Am returning the the blogosphere after some considerable hiatuses (due to debugging of Chem4Word which has taken many of the 162h w-1. That’s starting to ease up). So I’m at the Royal Institution in the company of 170 bloggers – the meeting (#solo09) was oversubscribed and I’m grateful to being squeezed in. I may blog on some of the sessions, but the current one is off-limits – for good reasons.
We had a great party last night hosted by Mendeley – the new company which is gearing up to revolutionise how we use references. I hadn’t realised they were in London – Farringdon – we had a very pleasant rooftop gathering with about 50-70 others.
We had 4 sessions – 2 planned – 2 unconference – where we shared aspirations, history, problems, etc. Had a great time talking about Galaxy Zoo – the online community that annotates galaxies. There’s about a million galaxies that needed to be annotated – do they look like spirals or “green swirly things” or “processed peas”? I knew GZ was large, but I was surprised to find out there were 230,000 registered members. About 70,000 are active.
So why do they do it? Apparently there are motivated by contributing to science. They’ve had 12 papers published on GZ work. So what a splendid idea to translate to other endeavours. We had a session at Scifoo on crowdsourcing science and this is certainly something that I’ll be taking on board.
More later…