Science Library Pad

Quantum to Cosmos at Perimeter Institute - October 2009

For 10 exciting days this October, Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future (Q2C) will take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe. All events will occur on-site in Waterloo, Ontario and online at q2cfestival.com

http://www.q2cfestival.com/

October 15-25, 2009  Waterloo, Ontario

They have usual blog, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed.

You can attend in person, but I think all events will also be streamed live online.

There's a good list of speakers already.

ChangeCamp Ottawa 2009 - from circle to grid to circle

Just a quick post to capture a sense of ChangeCamp Ottawa yesterday.  This a deliberate echo of my SciFoo 2007 posting, as SciFoo is where I learned about unconferences.

The basic format is you all gather around a common interest, but there is no set agenda - the participants at the event draw up the schedule (in ChangeCamp terminology "The Grid") of sessions and then facilitate and participate in them.

Opening Circle

CC-BY-NC-ND http://www.flickr.com/photos/crangulabford/3536145033/

Opening Circle (the community gathers)

CC-BY-NC-SA Richard Akerman

The Grid

CC-BY-NC-ND http://www.flickr.com/photos/crangulabford/3536168537/

The Grid (live action version)

CC-BY-NC-ND http://www.flickr.com/photos/crangulabford/3536997430/

The Closing Circle - at the end of the day, we came back into the circle again

CC-BY-SA http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlq/3538191922/

Together - apart - together.  A constant dynamic.  This is the nature of the new communities we are forming online and offline.

There was also lots of video captured - there are over 50 videos up on YouTube and as well Gwen captured a lot of video on Ustream.  There was a fair amount of audio coverage too, there are a few "audioboo" interviews from Ian, as well Apartment613 was going around with a mike and Robin Browne was there with his cool microphone/recorder thingy.  There are over 300 photos up on Flickr.  The tag to look for is cco09

The "virtual grid" of sessions is up on the wiki, but there is still a fair amount of work to get all the notes integrated.  (We had some technical challenges with the particular wiki software.)

We had some good discussions about open government and open data.

Overall very successful for a first event in Ottawa.  And yes, we're already talking about next year...

Previously:
May 13, 2009  ChangeCamp Ottawa - May 16, 2009 - sold out

ChangeCamp Ottawa - May 16, 2009 - sold out

ChangeCamp Ottawa is sold out.  This unconference about citizens re-engaging with government and with each other, enabled by technology, will be this Saturday May 16 (2009).

Here's a kind of bookend from my perspective (I'm sure it's different for all the organisers):

http://friendfeed.com/scilib/f3bdb183/some-changecamp-ottawa-history

this tweet I sent was actually a question, but somehow turned into the plan - from @scilib (me): @thornley So that's #changecampottawa planning at say 6 PM at http://www.clocktower.ca/ on Bank on Monday February 16? http://twitter.com/scilib/status/1203041472

from @scilib (me): last big ChangeCamp Ottawa planning meeting tonight May 11. Event itself will be this Saturday May 16. #cco09  http://twitter.com/scilib/status/1762070027

In case you're wondering what the point of Twitter is, it was a key enabler that helped to make possible all of the connections between people who had never met.  From tweets in February, to a sold-out event in May.

You can find us on the web:
* the (closed but public) social network for the event, courtesy of one of our sponsors, Pathable
* the main changecamp.ca site
* Twitter hashtag #cco09
* tag cco09 anywhere else
* I've also made a FriendFeed aggregator which should be a good place to track live reporting / uploads during the event.  (Unfortunately due to the FF redesign, it kind of looks like all the items come "from" ChangeCamp Ottawa - they're actually just being pulled in from various sources on the web.)

Apartment613 has an interview with Mark Faul, and CHUO Around the Block interviewed Morgen Peers.  (To some extent Morgen and I helped to sustain the event through its initial growing pains - we were the only two people in common between the first and second organising meetings.)

UPDATE: I see Mark Faul has written a post (rather more thoughtful and insightful than my just-the-facts approach above) - and he has also made a NetVibes aggregator for the event.

UPDATE 2: I should mention that ChangeCamp is also in Facebook, if you like that sort of thing.

Acfas - La science en français

L’Université d’Ottawa est heureuse d’accueillir, du 11 au 15 mai 2009, le 77e Congrès de l’Acfas, et fière de contribuer ainsi plus que jamais à l’avancement et à la mise en valeur du français dans tous les champs de la connaissance. Notre institution bilingue fait sa part en se classant 5e au Canada en termes d’intensité de la recherche scientifique. Aux portes du Québec et au cœur de la capitale canadienne, l’Université d’Ottawa vous invite à explorer un campus où se vit tous les jours la dualité linguistique de notre pays. Cliquez ici pour en savoir plus: http://www.acfas.ca/ ou http://www.acfas.ca/congres/a_propos.html ou http://www.acfas.ca/congres/2009/pages/grilles.html

via email from / par courriel de Jacynthe de Saint-Hilaire

building a conference social network: Pathable

After, shall we say, considerable deliberation, ChangeCamp Ottawa went with Pathable as our provider for a conference social network.  What I found compelling is that they have EventBrite integration, which means once we were ready to go, it was able to pull current registrations across (with names, emails, and affiliations) and send out Pathable invites, and as new users register it will automatically pick up the EventBrite registration and send out an invite.

While this still means a bit of extra effort on the part of users, it does reduce a bit the usual approach which is that you have to actually notice there is a separate conference socialnet and then go register separately and re-enter all your info.

It's not a free service, but we're getting great tech support.

(I should note that Pathable is a sponsor of ChangeCamp Ottawa.)

The event registration itself is at 

http://changecampottawa2009.eventbrite.com/

Once you register there it will do the automagic described above and send you an invite for

http://changecamp-ca.pathable.com/

I think it will be a good way to get people to engage before the unconference (but I'm being realistic about the amount of conversation that may go on - getting discussions going is HARD) and also just as importantly, I think it will be useful for the "oh I should connect to that guy I met, what was his name..." activity after the unconference.

What have your experiences been with conference socialnets?  Any suggestions?

going to ChangeCamp Ottawa

There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work on ChangeCamp Ottawa, and registration is now open (it's free, but there are a limited number of tickets).

ChangeCamp Ottawa is being organized by the Ottawa community to bring together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy makers, political players, change-makers and government employees to discuss participatory governance in a web-enabled world.

The event will be an unconference; the schedule will be put together by the attendees in the morning.

Thanks to great support from Mark Faul and the city, we have a fantastic venue at City Hall, I took some photos.  This will be a great opportunity for Ottawa area citizens to connect with their local government and with one another.

The event will be May 16, 2009.

Get your free ticket at http://changecampottawa2009.eventbrite.com/  (As there are a limited number, please only get a ticket if you are fairly sure you will be attending.)
I think there's supposed to be Pathable integration with EventBrite, but I don't know if it's working yet.

I've also created an Upcoming event.  I'm using tag/hashtag cco09.

If you want some ideas about the topics we might cover at the event, you can have a look at the discussion grid from ChangeCamp Toronto.

On a related note, I guess the ALI's February conference was popular enough that they are having another one, right before ChangeCamp Ottawa.  Their (very not-free) Social Media for Government event will be May 12-13 in Ottawa, with preconference May 11 and postconference May 14.  You may want to continue the energy and ideas from the ALI event right on into ChangeCamp.

If you're interested in the organising side, there's still lots of work to do, you can connect to us at

http://wiki.changecamp.ca/ChangeCamp_Ottawa

We are meeting Mondays at City Hall at 6 PM.

UPDATE 2009-04-22:

There is a Facebook group for ChangeCamp in general.

We are working on the Pathable integration but not quite ready to switch it on.  When we do, anyone who has registered on EventBrite will get an invitation to the Pathable social network that is part of our event - please don't be surprised, or worry that we sold your address - this is just a way for us to all meet and discuss online before the event.

UPDATE 2009-04-24: Pathable is go.  If you registered on EventBrite and didn't receive an automatic Pathable invite, please let me know.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2009-05-17:  The event took place successfully, see my blog posting ChangeCamp Ottawa 2009 - from circle to grid to circle.  ENDUPDATE

Previously:
February 11, 2009  Making government data visible - and is Change coming to Ottawa?

CLA preconferences: Democracy and Emerging Technology

Just highlighting a couple of the many Canadian Library Association preconferences, before the main event in Montreal.

* Democracy & Technology (DemTech) - May 29, 2009 - Off-site: J.A. de Seve Cinema, J. W. McConnell Library Building, Concordia University (note this is NOT at the main event site)

DemTech 2009 will showcase cutting edge projects that use information technology to encourage citizen access and foster democratic participation. DemTech is a pre-conference of the 2009 Annual Conference and Trade Show of the Canadian Library Association, sponsored by Apathy is Boring, VisibleGovernment.ca and members of the CivicAccess.ca community.

You can see the DemTech.ca site, as well as some information on the CLA site.
I have been gathering some information related to this topic in my FriendFeed Open Government Canada room, and there will also be a local event, ChangeCamp Ottawa, on May 16, 2009.

* Emerging Technologies Interest Group (ETIG) Library Camp - May 29, 2009 - Palais des congrès

The morning sessions will include presentations by John Fink (McMaster University), Jason Hammond (Regina Public Library), and Jessamyn West (yes THE Jessamyn West of librarian.net) The afternoon will be an "unconference", where participants will share and learn on a variety of topics pre-determined by the group. (Note: this is not a "sage on the stage" afternoon – come armed with a curious nature and a will to participate.)

There is a FriendFeed room, a wiki, and a blog in addition to the CLA site.

Registration deadline for both these events is Friday, April 17, 2009.  You can register by faxing in the form, or by signing up on the CLA site and submitting your info online.

I will be attending DemTech.

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

ICSTI 2009 - Managing Data for Science

The ICSTI 2009 conference has a great lineup of speakers on its programme.  (I can't claim any responsibility for this, since while my organisation has helped with planning the conference, my small personal contribution has just been a few suggestions about the web presence.)

Many of the names you may recognize from enthusiastic blog postings of mine, so as you can imagine, I'm looking forward to going.  Speakers mentioned in this blog (with a link to the relevant posting) include

• Francine Berman (ARL library escience theme presentations - October 9, 2006)
• Richard Boulderstone (BioMed Central OA event presentations, BMC blog - March 7, 2007)
• Jan Brase (system for easy access to sci info using DOIs - Jan Brase - June 11 - IATUL 2007 - June 11, 2007)
• Lee Dirks (data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy - June 22, 2007)
• Liz Lyon (presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation - March 31, 2006)
• Paul Uhlir (the concepts of open science and information commons - September 8, 2006)

The event will be June 9-10, 2009 at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.  Early registration ends March 31.  I think it will be a great opportunity to discuss science data, e-science, and the roles that our libraries can play.  I am using tag icsti2009.  I hope to see many of you there.

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Libraries in Computers - March 31, 2009

I was thinking about the post title and it occurs to me - no offense to InfoToday - that "Computers in Libraries" is kind of an old way of thinking about things.  The reality today is Libraries in Computers.
This is not a new idea - Mark Weiser was writing about ubiquitous computing in Scientific American in 1991.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Is your library becoming a part of your patrons' everyday life?  All this to introduce CIL 2009 session

D203: Embedding Services: Go Where the Client Is

coming up on March 31, featuring my colleague Natalie Collins.  She'll talk about the process that got us to "allowing discovery to happen in the user’s regular work environment".  If you want more details, a previous post about a thousand words may give a hint.

conference technology planning

This list is incomplete, but I thought there was value in getting it out even in draft state, as it is related to some current discussion on FriendFeed.

An updated list of things to do when planning a conference where you would like to have a lot of online and offline interaction before, during and after the event.

Online

• Identify and promote a tag e.g. example2009
  
  • Make sure your tag is unique, avoids 1 vs. l and similar confusion, and is short
  • Short because you're also going to want it to be a Twitter hashtag e.g. #example2009
  • Consider registering your tag with various services (I don't know that this is a high priority - I believe a lot more in search-based tag discovery than search registration)
  • • one example is hitchhikr
• Get a URL, ideally with the tag embedded e.g. example2009.exampleorganisation.org
• Create an Upcoming event
  • This will also give you a machine code that Flickr users can embed to get a nice "This photo taken at Example event" notice.
• Create a SlideShare event to store the presentations
• Consider creating an event blog, if relevant
• Consider creating an event wiki, if relevant
• Consider creating an event Twitter account, if relevant (use of hashtags may cover this better)
• Use an aggregator to pull in all the tagged and hashtagged activity
• Create a FriendFeed room for shared conference liveblogging (this can also perform some of the functions of an event blog)
  • CoverItLive with Twitter integration is another option
• Use Google Maps and Google Earth integration to highlight your venue and surrounding attractions
  • UPDATE 2009-03-03: Since it may he hard for people to use a satellite map to recognise your venue, also consider photos of the exterior of your venue (geotagged in Flickr or PhotoSynth panorama are both good ways to show off the venue) as well as Google Street View and Microsoft Virtual Earth Birds Eye view (if they are available for your location).  ENDUPDATE
• Provide live video/webcast, live audio, or later podcasts of audio and video recordings
• You can consider creating a CrowdVine site for the conference, but I'm not convinced how useful these one-off social networking sites are.
• Depending on your community, use the full arsenal of networks available to reach your desired audience.  This may be Facebook, but don't forget LinkedIn, Nature Network, and other sites that may be more aligned with your particular target demographic.  NOTE: This requires considerable care.  There is nothing more disliked in an existing community than an outsider "parachuting in" to promote a particular event / topic / agenda.  Make sure you know the etiquette (yes, there is such a thing online) and conventions of any site you use.

Offline

• Stable WiFi (a somewhat mythical creature I have yet to see) with all procedures in place (e.g. passwords or accounts if the venue requires them)
• Lots and lots of power outlets
• State the event tag and your expectations of audience technology use at the start of each day (something like "be respectful" will probably cover it)
• Prepare presenters who may not be used to live coverage by their audience, for example see How to Present While People are Twittering
  • Also consider having the presenters suggest a single unified location for live coverage - see FriendFeed thread on this topic
• If you plan to record audio or video, check out well in advance what the venue can provide
  • And make sure you get permission from presenters in advance
• Consider using QR Code on badges, either for contact information or to connect to people's websites/blogs

Other guides:

* Walt Crawford has some fantastic information about conferences in http://citesandinsights.info/civ7i7.pdf
* Some thoughts on the "amplified conference" on Wikipedia, based on thoughts from from Lorcan Dempsey, Brian Kelly and others

Previously:
My July 8, 2006 posting conference tag goodness with HitchHikr has links at the bottom to my examination of this topic spanning back to 2004.  (This blog was started as a place to put conference notes, so thinking about conference support is in some sense part of its DNA.)

City of Toronto Web 2.0 Summit Nov. 26-27, 2008

Looks like you can go to City Hall Council Chamber (?) or attend the webcast.
They have a gigantic speakers list, including Ken Cochrane, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Government of Canada and Peter Cowan, Director of Enterprise Information Management at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan).

The site says

City of Toronto Web 2.0 Summit will be an exciting, interactive forum to explore how Web 2.0 technology can change the way governments interact with citizens, create policies and make decisions.

City of Toronto - Moving Toward Government 2.0 - Web 2.0 Summit

via Michael Neilson in FriendFeed

SPARC 2008 on the web

SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 - November 17-18, 2008

A few channels for you to follow the meeting:

• Twitter hashtag #sparc08
• I made a FriendFeed room sparc2008 that includes the RSS feed from the Twitter hashtag (anyone is welcome to add additional content)
• I have been trying an experiment with the CoverItLive "liveblogging" tool -
  

  SPARC 2008 liveblog experiment

• Dorothea Salo blogged about John Wilbanks' inspiring call to action (just share, innovate and hack, rather than talking about it)

SPARC 2008 liveblog experiment

Just an experiment with CoverItLive - may fail totally, we'll see.

Science 21 video and presentations

I have been following the Science in the 21st Century conference via the FriendFeed room

http://beta.friendfeed.com/rooms/science21

and via that room I see that the first day's presentations and video are already up on the Perimeter Institute's archive, PIRSA

http://pirsa.org/C08021

Libraries in E-Science - Christine Borgman

A digital video of Christine L. Borgman's "Role of Libraries in E-Science" presentation at EAHIL 2008 is available. Her presentation slides are also available.

Video: Christine Borgman on the Role of Libraries in E-Science - Digital Koans - July 21st, 2008

I reviewed Borgman's book Scholarship in the Digital Age for Nature; she has a comprehensive view of the many different factors that go into scholarly communication online.

NISO Next Gen Discovery presentations up

A question in my FriendFeed prompted me to check if the presentations are up for NISO Discovery Forum 2008 and they are (well, most of them).

http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/agenda/

Presentations ranged across the library discovery space including academic bookmarking, federated searching, tagging, web services, and blogging.

You can find supplemental info for Peter Murray's presentation at http://dltj.org/article/niso-discovery-presentation-links/

(Full disclosure: I was also a presenter - I posted a small amount of supplemental info for my presentation.)

Access 2008 preliminary programme up

http://access2008.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/program/

open source, mashups, browser extensions, next gen catalogues/opacs and such

via Library Boy

Mashed Libraries UK 2008

Owen Stephens, inspired by Mashed Museum, is proposing Mashed Libraries UK 2008.

the idea is to have a reasonably informal event at which we try to do interesting stuff with library technology and/or data

He's put together a starting list of possible APIs... there must be many more that people could add or offer...

Services/APIs/Systems/Technology/Data that we could use

via Twitter

science conference in World of Warcraft

John Bohannon has quite a lengthy article on the logistics of organizing the first science conference in World of Warcraft.

Slaying Monsters for Science
Science 20 June 2008:
Vol. 320. no. 5883, p. 1592
DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5883.1592c

via Duncan Hull's FriendFeed

You can find more information about the guild they created, Science guild, as well as some info about the conference.  It is reported that full transcripts of the conference itself (which was on the topic of research performed on and in virtual worlds) were recorded, but I couldn't find them.

If this sounds rather esoteric, consider

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. ... World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia.

World of Warcraft Reaches 10 Million Subscribers - 22 January 2008

That's active subscriber count, at about $15 per month per subscriber.
In other words, this single game is a billion dollar enterprise.

Second Life seems to get more attention in academic circles, perhaps because it is free to the end user, and you can manipulate the environment, creating objects.  It took me a long time to "get" Second Life, and my eventual conclusion was that it was like being inside of a programming language.  It is not a game in the conventional sense.  Second Life is platform, not narrative.

By contrast, World of Warcraft (WoW or just Warcraft) [1] gives you a huge and (if your computer is up to the task) high-performance, visually-rich environment to explore.  I am often somewhat disappointed that most of us have tremendously powerful computers but we rarely are presented with any software that fully exploits those capabilities.  Google Earth was the first application in the past few years that I found truly revolutionary.  Getting a guided tour of WoW from John, and seeing the endless detail of its cities and countryside, was the second time in recent years that I was truly impressed by the "step change" in what is now possible.  The game world is enormous, and completely consistent.  Bridges don't stick out into thin air, paths don't run across water... everywhere you go, there is a richly detailed world.  In addition, the world is live (and dangerous).

[1] Technically Warcraft refers to any of a number of games from Blizzard, previous versions were not full multiplayer worlds.  I will use it just as shorthand for World of Warcraft in this posting.

I've written a few times about Warcraft, as well as having an entire Second Life category.
August 27, 2007  World of Warcraft... in The Lancet
January 14, 2007  a library quest
January 11, 2007  World of Warcraft has over 8 million subscribers
December 5, 2006  more Second Life, plus South Park [and Warcraft]

If you want to know more about the logistics of holding a Warcraft conference, some very game-specific info is below:

By live, I mean that you are not alone in the world.  If you are flying and you see fighting going on below you, this isn't just some game cinematics, it's real people somewhere in the world, playing the game.  In the cities, hundreds of human-controlled characters are busy shopping, banking, and selling.

There are clearly very sophisticated proximity and latency algorithms powering an engine in which groups of geographically dispursed players can coordinate on tasks where a second's delay is literally the (game world) difference between life and death.

With a huge cash flow, Blizzard is able to not only sustainably grow the infrastructure of the game, but to continuously add to the game content as well.  An entirely new world, Outland, was added to the original world of Azeroth.

Given that this is a complex and mostly unconstrained, live-running game world, it is not surprising that the logistics of organising a non-game event are substantial, and the Science article is mostly about that experience.

Here are a few things you need to know:
* You start off as a level 1 character, in your race's starting location (a location always some distance from a city)
* You can travel by walking, but the amount of aggression (aggro) you attract depends on the level difference between you and your enemies.  At level 1, you aggro everything.
* While you cannot[2] be attacked by other human-controlled characters (unlike many games of this type), there are world beasts wandering around that can and will attack.  Wandering around is a recipe for a quick death.  You are somewhat safer (you generate less aggro) if walking on a defined path or road, but at level 1, even this does not provide full safety - beasts near the edge of the road will run on it to kill you.
* Level 1 characters have so few health points that they die very quickly in battle.  Often a single hit will kill them.
* There are two "factions", Horde and Alliance.  They have cities and outposts which are guarded by computer-controlled guards who are high-level (usually the maximum player level, 70, or higher).  They WILL attack characters from the opposing faction.  There are some neutral cities where both factions can meet, but they are in medium to high-level areas.
* Travel in the game takes real time, walking or running is slowest.  Mounted travel (e.g. horses) is not available to low-level characters.  Any level of character can access flight paths, but they have to go to the flight end points first and they have to be able to pay (there is limited free public transit, such as the Deeprun Tram).
* The game is organized into realms, each realm is a copy of the entire virtual world.  Individual characters are bound to their realm, and can only see and communicate with other players in that realm.
* When you die, you can be brought back to life, but it requires either travel (to "get back" to your body) or high-level characters with resurrection skills or equipment
* Equipment (such as better armor) costs money, and is constrained by levels (i.e. you can't give a level 1 character a set of level 70 armor).
* It is possible you may attracted "griefers" who, while they couldn't attack your party directly, can not only run around shouting and being generally annoying, but can also "pull" monsters into the conference area, whereupon the monsters may start attacking conference attendees.
* When they are killed, monsters will "respawn" in roughly the same location shortly thereafter.  You can't permanently clear an area of monsters; you have to keep killing them as they respawn.

[2] Unless you explicitly flag yourself for Player-versus-Player (PvP) or are on a PvP server

So a conference presents numerous challenges:
* If you want a broad attendance, you need to support both experienced characters and newbies/n00bs (level 1 characters) who bring many challenges: they aren't familiar with the game, and it is a dangerous environment.
* Additionally level 1 characters are squishy (easily killed by beasts and guards) and have very little money.
* Experienced players are likely to be scattered across many different realms and belong to existing guilds; they are unlikely to want to change realm, although they might temporarily change guild.

So the best you can do is find a realm with enough high-level players who are interested in helping, both financially and in terms of offence and defence.  A conference is the WoW equivalent of an Escort Quest - you have someone you need to protect as they move from location to location.  However it's an Escort Quest on an unprecendented scale - in WoW the largest collaborative efforts, raids, are 4 combined teams of 5 players, for a total of 20 people.  For a conference, you may have hundreds of attendees. (Although it is true that sometimes groups this large are organised for the fun of e.g. attacking another city, similar to the end event of the conference.)

To do it properly, you'd have to find a defensible position for the main conference sessions.  Then you have to get everyone there alive.  Then if you want to do tours or field trips, you have to again keep everyone alive.  We're talking classic medieval age warfare.  In Azeroth they can't be attacked from the air, so you need to form a defence perimeter, with high-level characters clearing away all possible threats, additional high-levels scattered throughout the group to provide assistance for any problems or threats that may pop up inside the perimeter and characters with healing or resurrection powers in case something befalls the low-levels despite all the other efforts.  The logistics of it are actually quite an interesting challenge.

UPDATE:

Also I forgot to mention that realms are limited in the number of character accounts they will permit, for performance reasons, and high-level characters are more likely to be on realms that are full or nearly full.

For these reasons it seems to me this best option, if it were possible, would be for Blizzard to provide a test server and allow users to copy or temporarily move their characters over for the duration of the event.  I'm not saying they should make the environment otherwise any different (i.e. no "holodeck safeties on") but just provide a dedicated conference realm.

ENDUPDATE

If you want to get some idea of the richness of the environment, you can see my World of Warcraft - solo set on Flickr.  It's more "stuff I thought was cool" than a comprehensive overview of the world.  Here's one screenshot:

OR08 - the presentation layer is destroying our data

I have lots of raw notes, but I'll wait to see whether the presentations show up at the Open Repositories 2008 conference repository (for some reason, I keep wanting to spell this "respository").

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

One of the main themes that I've heard in terms of doing science with repositories over the past couple days is that presentation formats, particularly PDF, are destroying the data (e.g. chemical structures and reactions) that we have so carefully assembled.  Then we have to make machines work really hard to try to reconstruct this data, which is madness to me (although I accept it may be the only practical solution in the near term).

I would argue that HTML plays a similar role in emphasizing "what looks good" rather than adding to that "and is also usable by machines under the hood".

And in a different way, PowerPoint, with its constraints of display and its style of bullet points, discards our complex ideas and presents them in a lossy, radically oversimplified way (with a dependency of course on the skills of the presenters).

OCLC stuff - NISO Discovery Forum

Very raw notes.  Basically OCLC continues to build out services based on their data holdings, are adding services where organisations can provide additional information, and are aiming to systematize the services with documentation on OCLC DevNet.

Mike Teets
VP Global Engineering, OCLC

identities, xISBN, xISSN

other identifier services are coming...
xOCLCnum service
WorkID service?

-

Worldcat Identities

http://orlabs.oclc.org/identities

-

Worldcat API

OCLC Grid

"invitation only release"

essentially programmatic access to WorldCat

Web Services
- access WorldCat records and holdings
- mashups with WorldCat

Request: OpenSearch & SRU
Response Formats: RSS, Atom (OSS), Marc XML, DC (SRU)
Return holdings based on geographic context

WorldCat Search Web Service builder
(a demonstration application)

-

WorldCat Registry

institution registry

worldcat.org/registry/institutions

unique id for each institution

-

Worldcat OpenURL Resolver Gateway

worldcatlibraries.org/registry/gateway

Allows you to register your IPs and associated resolver.

contacts:
Roy Tennant tennantr@oclc.org
Don Hamparian hamparid@oclc.org *

Developer's Network
worldcat.org/devnet

Building SkyNet for Science - presentation for NISO Discovery Tools Forum

My presentation is available at

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/building-skynet-for-science-discovering-new-frontiers-using-embedded-knowledge/

A lot of it is conceptual, so you may want to wait until the audio is available from the http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/ NISO site - http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/ (hopefully next week).

UPDATE 2009-04-16: I don't think audio was made available.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2008-03-28: I forgot to mention that all some of the supporting links for the presentation (will be) are available at http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/nisodiscovery2008  ENDUPDATE

I thought it went well, although as first speaker up there is a disadvantage of not seeing how other people set up.  I was in a bit of a rush to get started so that I would finish on time, so I didn't do a great job of attaching my mike and I just held the wireless transmitter in my hand.  With the transmitter in one hand and my laser pointer gripped in the other for the entire 50 minutes, it's possible I looked a bit of a prat.

I usually try to remember to keep my hands free for presentations so that I can use more natural body language, anyway lesson learned.

I also forgot to say "The future is not set.  There's no fate but what we make for ourselves." before the last slide.

There are some common themes emerging from the presentations, I'm always amazed when a bunch of people develop presentations in isolation and then they actually all fit together when presented.

I've posted some photos of the presenters in my Flickr under nisodiscovery2008 (my cameraphone can upload directly to Flickr over WiFi), they also show up because of the machine tag linkage on the Upcoming page.  No pics of Chapel Hill yet as I don't have a car and it turns out while we're only about 4km from the town, the most direct route for me to get there I think would be to walk beside a six-lane divided highway, which is not too appealing.

UPDATE 2008-03-28: The carbon offset for my flights from myclimate.org (including the trip to Open Repositories) was about C$118.

Open Repositories 2008

Through an unexpected series of events I find myself going to Open Repositories 2008

http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

The lineup looks great including a keynote from Peter Murray-Rust, and two (!) sessions on Scientific Repositories.

There is also a Repository Challenge for developers with a £2,500 prize, which is like a million US dollars now (finally, Canadians get to make US dollar jokes).  Kudos to David Flanders for leading this "let's just build stuff and see what works" approach.

I will be blogging under tag/category or08, and twittering under hashtag #or08

I made an Upcoming event, mainly because then if you add the machine tag

upcoming:event=455039

to your Flickr photos, it will automatically put in a nice "Taken at Open Repositories 2008" logo.

9th International Bielefeld Conference

Happened to be checking the conference website and I see that, although it's one year off from its previous 2-year cycle, the International Bielefeld Conference is pre-announced to be back February 3-5, 2009.

Bielefeld University Library will continue its successful series of conferences in early 2009.

Like the previous ones, this conference will provide an international platform for trendsetting and stimulating discussions among customers and providers of information services, especially among scholars, information specialists, publishers, library managers, and patrons.

http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/

Well, I know what I'll be adding to this year's list of proposed events (my planning cycle is March-March).

I think it's invitation only though...

I don't know what's best for a tag, I'm going to go with 9ibc for now.

Previously:
April 28, 2006  conference proceedings: ICSTI eScience, Bielefeld + Taiga + LtF on academic library future
February 15, 2006  roles and challenges for the academic library in e-Science