Dictated into Arcturus
I have just been at #scifoo – a remarkable annual gathering created and run by Google (Larry Page), Nature (Timo Hannay) , and O’Reilly (Tim O’Reilly). I have been privileged to have been invited three times and without question this was the best #scifoo for me.
#scifoo is an unconference. That means that there is no set agenda and anything might happen. There is an approximate format that has been worked out over the years. The camp lasts for about two days and there are about 7 1-hour sessions per day. These can be anything from presentations to demonstrations to group activities to unstructured discussion. We start by introducing ourselves giving our affiliation and then three words to describe whatever is at the top of our mind. Mine was “reclaim our scholarship” and I also showed the flowerpoint. (as you can see #scifoo is extremely informal and there are many people who bring along all sorts of physical objects from fossils to puzzles to knitting to Lego, so the flowerpoint is perfectly in tune).
Then there is a mad rush for people to propose sessions. Although there has been considerable pre-discussion from some people, there is no priority and it depends a little bit on how hard you shove. Three of us (Carl Bergstrom, Johan Bollen and me) proposed a session on ” reclaim our scholarship” (RoS) and this took place on the Saturday (about 15 people came). But numbers are not important and if two or three people come that’s quite OK by #scifoo. Sometimes the sessions suggested have so much in common that they are collapsed and redesigned.
There’s lots of physical objects – a sailing machine that can go faster than the wind, Lego implementations of Babbage’s engines and the Antikythera mechanism, and a lot more. One session I went to was on three-d printers. There are lots of chairs , food and drink (Google is famed for its food). Any one can go up to any one and can talk about anything. One session I went to has involved Greg Bear, SF writer, talking about recent papers in Nature describing quantum coherence in photosynthesis. He was speculating that this might extend to neuronal activity and that this could affect our perception of time and causality. There was a mix of people most of whom did not understand the science but two or three who did. It was a very enjoyable and good humoured session without resolving anything very definitely.
The RoS session went pretty well including some excellent presentations from Carl and Johann. One of the themes at #scifoo is trying to look beyond the immediate extension of our activities, and in this session (and another on the future of scholarly publishing) some of us are trying to jump to a future some years ahead where we can rely on the web, computers, AI and open collaboration giving us very different ways of working. It certainly confirmed me in my own determination to change the way we produce disseminate and evaluate scholarly material.
A major feature of #scifoo is the encouragement for people to expand their visions and to go to sessions that they know nothing about. So a constant theme was the changing nature of society both in terms of the collapse of current institutions and the potential of the new technologies. Andrew Marr from the BBC talked about the death of journalism, how this would affect political and social discourse and decision-making. It was great to have a chat with him after words about the way scientists think and behave at the sorts of things that we believe we can contribute to decision-making and information gathering. …
Hopefully more later