SciFoo wrapup

The easiest explanation I can give to describe the SciFoo 2007 unconference is to borrow something I think I overheard, which is that at many conferences the best discussions take place in the hallways between sessions and at the bar afterwards, so SciFoo is designed emphasize those informal discussion opportunities.  Which of course, means there was a FooBar.

There was lots of cool stuff.  Seeing science fiction genius author Neal Stephenson whiteboarding in a session he was presenting with Jaron Lanier and Lee Smolin on the philosophy of the nature of time was something I can't imagine in any other venue.  The fact that Martha Stewart was sitting in the front row watching the session was an added element of extraordinaryness.  Getting a chance to talk with SF author Greg Bear, whose work I have enjoyed for years, was also awesome (see books of his in my LibraryThing).

How's that for name dropping?

In case it all sounds shiny, I was so nervous talking to Chris Anderson that I told him I had reviewed his book The Wisdom of Crowds (which he didn't write), when of course it was actually The Long Tail I reviewed for Nature.  I'm fairly sure everything I said to him following that gaffe was quite daft as well.

I was a bit hesitant to put myself up on the session board, but then I figured what the heck, I'm here, might as well go up.  So I did a small session (about 6 people) on E-Science and library services yesterday, and a similarly small session on web tools for science today (the idea being that people would get a chance to share their favourite tools - I mainly talked about LibX and then went around the table getting the other participants to talk about their fave tools or projects).

Saw a really cool talk about the LSST, which should be an absolutely amazing telescope, they have the minor problem of 30 TB of data per night, quite the computational challenge - lots of opportunities for people to come up with clever algorithms and techniques.

Also saw a cool NASA talk but I can't tell you what it was about (the SciFoo blogging rules are much more open this year, but there were a few things we were asked not to share).

I only managed a few pics, I'll try to upload them in a day or two.

Duncan Hull took lots including the session boards and participant boards.

There were lots of opportunities to discuss possible web tools for science, and also lots and lots of discussion of the popular topics of open access, peer review, Death to the Impact Factor, scholarly publishing 2.3.0 and all that good stuff.

Some of the discussions in these areas reminded me of the material covered in the ICSTI conference on peer review and research quality assessment, unfortunately the presentations and videos aren't up on the site yet, but you can read my ICSTI2007 conference notes, including my presentation.