Tag: conference

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Some slides for granting permissions (or not) in presentations

A couple of weeks ago there was a significant fracas over Daniel MacArthur‘s tweeting from a Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory meeting.  This was followed in pretty quick succession by an article in Nature discussing the problems that could be caused when the details of presentations no longer stop at the walls of the conference room and all of these led to a discussion (see also friendfeed discussions) about how to make it clear whether you are happy or not with your presentation being photographed, videoed, or live blogged. A couple of suggestions were made for logos or icons that might be used.

I thought it might be helpful rather than a single logo to have a panel that allows the presenter to permit some activities but not others and put together a couple of mockups.

Permission to do whatever with presentationPermission to do less with presentation

I’ve also uploaded a PowerPoint file with the two of these as slides to Slideshare which should enable you to download, modify, and extract the images as you wish. In both cases they are listed as having CC-BY licences but feel free to use them without any attribution to me.

In some of the Friendfeed conversations there are some good comments about how best to represent and suggestions on possible improvements. In particular Anders Norgaard suggests a slightly more friendly “please don’t” rather than my “do not”. Entirely up to you, but I just wanted to get these out. At the moment these are really just to prompt discussion but if you find them useful then please re-post modified versions for others to use.

[Ed. The social media icons are from Chris Ross and are by default under a GPL license. I have a request in to make them available to the Public Domain or as CC-BY at least for re-use. And yes I should have picked this up before.]

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Conferences as Spam? Liveblogging science hits the mainstream

I am probably supposed to be writing up some weighty blog post on some issue of importance but this is much more fun. Last year’s International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) kicked off one of the first major live blogging exercises in a mainstream biology conference. It was so successful that the main instigators were invited to write up the exercise and the conference in a paper in PLoS Comp Biol. This year, the conference organizers, with significant work from Michael Kuhn and many others, have set up a Friendfeed room and publicised this from the off, with the idea of supporting a more “official”, or at least coordinated process of disseminating the conference to the wider world. Many have been waiting in anticipation for the live blogging to start due to logistical or financial difficulties in attending in person.

However, there were also concerns. Many of the original ring leaders were not attending. With the usual suspects confined to their home computers would the general populace take up the challenge and provide the rich feed of information the world was craving? Things started well, then moved on rapidly as the room filled up. But the question as to whether it was sustainable was answered pretty effectively when the Friendfeed room went suddenly quiet. Fear gripped the microbloggers. Could the conference go on? Gradually the technorati figured out they could still post by VPNing to somewhere else. Friendfeed was blocking the IP corresponding to the conference wireless network. So much traffic was being generated it looked like spam! This has now been corrected, and normal service resumed, but in a funny and disturbing kind of way it seems to me like a watershed. There were enough people, and certainly not just the usual suspects, live blogging a scientific conference that the traffic looked like spam. Ladies and Gentleman. Welcome to the mainstream.