Google Wave has got an awful lot of people quite excited. And others are more sceptical. A lot of SciFoo attendees were therefore very excited to be able to get an account on the developer sandbox as part of the weekend. At the opening plenary Stephanie Hannon gave a demo of Wave and, although there were numerous things that didn’t work live, that was enough to get more people interested. On the Saturday morning I organized a session to discuss what we might do and also to provide an opportunity …

Last Friday afternoon (was it really only a week ago?) about 200 people made their way to the Googleplex in Mountain View for the fourth SciFoo. There are many people who got their blog posts out well before me so I will focus on the sessions which don’t seem to have been heavily discussed and try to draw a few themes out.
For me, the over riding theme that came through was Engagement. Engaging people beyond the narrow confines of the professional research community in real research projects, making science more …

Last week I was lucky enough to attend both SciBarCamp Palo Alto and SciFoo; both for the second time. In the next few posts I will give a brief survey of the highlights of both, kicking off with SciBarCamp. I will follow up with more detail on some of the main things to come out of these meetings over the next week or so.
SciBarCamp followed on from last year’s BioBarCamp and was organized by Jamie McQuay, John Cumbers, Chris Patil, and Shirley Wu. It was held at the Institute for …

As I mentioned yesterday and Shirley Wu picked up on, the final session of Science Blogging 2008 offered a challenge to the audience (and to anyone else) to get more senior scientists blogging. The official announcement is now live – and a free trip to next year’s Science Foo Camp the ultimate prize.

So Michael Nielsen, one morning at breakfast at Scifoo asked one of those questions which never has a short answer; ‘So how did you get into this open science thing?’ and I realised that although I have told the story to many people I haven’t ever written it down. Perhaps this is a meme worth exploring more generally but I thought others might be interested in my story, partly because it illustrates how funding drives scientists, and partly because it shows how the combination of opportunism and serendipity can make …

This is the second in a series of posts (first one here) in which I am trying to process and collect ideas that came out of Scifoo. This post arises out of a discussion I had with Michael Eisen (UC Berkely) and Sean Eddy (HHMI Janelia Farm) at lunch on the Saturday. We had drifted from a discussion of the problem of attribution stacking and citing datasets (and datasets made up of datasets) into the problem of academic credit. I had trotted out the usual spiel about the need for …

One of the many great pleasures of SciFoo was to meet with people who had a different, and in many cases much more comprehensive, view of managing data and making it available. One of the long term champions of data availability is Professor Helen Berman, the head of the Protein Data Bank (the international repository for biomacromolecular structures), and I had the opportunity to speak with her for some time on the Friday afternoon before Scifoo kicked off in earnest (in fact this was one of many somewhat embarrasing situations …

I am too tired to write anything even vaguely coherent. As will have been obvious there was little opportunity for microblogging, I managed to take no video at all, and not even any pictures. It was non-stop, at a level of intensity that I have very rarely encountered anywhere before. The combination of breadth and sharpness that many of the participants brought was, to be frank, pretty intimidating but their willingness to engage and discuss and my realisation that, at least in very specific areas, I can hold my own …

So BioBarCamp started yesterday with a bang and a great kick off. Not only did we somehow manage to start early we were consistently running ahead of schedule. With several hours initially scheduled for introductions this actually went pretty quick, although it was quite comprehensive. During the introduction many people expressed an interest in ‘Open Science’, ‘Open Data’, or some other open stuff, yet it was already pretty clear that many people meant many different things by this. It was suggested that with the time available we have a discussion …

Written on the train on the way from Barcelona to Grenoble. This life really is a lot less exotic than it sounds… 
The workshop that I’ve reported on over the past few days was both positive and inspiring. There is a real sense that the ideas of Open Access and Open Data are becoming mainstream. As several speakers commented, within 12-18 months it will be very unusual for any leading institution not to have a policy on Open Access to its published literature. In many ways as far as Open Access …