I am back in Heidelberg after the weekend in the Googleplex in the Science Foo Camp. I missed the introduction to the meeting due to flight delays but you can read about it here and here. The schedule was set up on a board where anyone could write in a talk on one of the slots. There where up to 14 small and big rooms available at any time for anyone to set up a discussion. As you can imagine the problem with this is that there are always more that one interesting thing to see at the same time. I'll try to describe some of the meetings I attended.
Saturday
The first presentation I went to was about the history of data visualization. Much of it can be seen in this website. For me it was interesting from the historical point of view but I was hoping for a bit more of discussion on the future of data representation.
Evolution of man - This was an open discussion moderated by a science fiction writer. His main message was that we need to increase the bandwidth of communication between members of our species. In itself this is not very new, the idea of the hive mind (i.e. the borg). What he was proposing was however that humans should engineer bandwidth into things like pheromones/smell and speech. I tried to argue after the meeting that brain-machine interfaces seem to be a much more practical way to achieve this since some clear progress is already under way. He counter to say that there is a lot that is not coded in the brain (not in a metaphysical sense) but in the physical properties of our body.
New scientific tools - The main objective of this discussion was to come up with a wish list of new scientific tools to develop. Some of the tools discussed:
- Energy production tools (most developments expected in biology. Is there a limit to biologically produced energy and is this enough? )
- Tools to identify and study microbial communities
- Communication of science (structured info; tools that are as good for debate as wikis are for consensus)
- Neurobiology (better ways to probe the neuronal interconnections, dynamics and plasticity)
- Data and web infrastructure - A representative of the NSF (National Science Foundation) mentioned the efforts of the institution to set up internet infrastructures.
The moderator noted that most of the discussion was about biology (and not because most people were from biology). Most of us agreed that in biology there is more to room to grow.
Virtual communities for collaborative research - There were two main view points in this meeting. There was some interest from university representatives in creating the tools to set up virtual communities. This includes dealing with problems like identity, creditation for education, virtual remote instrumentation, permissions and rights. Another viewpoint was from one particular type of online community, 3D virtual worlds. A representative from Linden Labs (Second Life) gave some ideas of how to use 3D worlds for science communication (more about this below).
Web 2.0 at Nature - Timo Hannay gave a presentation on the tools under development in Nature. For anyone following the Nascent blog there was nothing very new there. If you want to know more about how Nature is exploring web2.0 take a look and explore this list of tools.
Open Science Discussion - This was a general discussion about open science, including peer review, blogs, wikis, etc.
The peer review trial was introduced by a Nature editor. They are going to extend the trial a bit further (I think until end of October) but so far there have been very few comments posted. On a positive note, Nature editors were surprised with the high amount of researchers that are accepting the open review track. The percentage is very small but it it still is above their expectation. They are having some problems with lack of awareness and the low number of comments can easily be explained by this. I was afraid that Nature would just argue that the lack of participation means that open peer review does not work but I am glad that this will not the case.
A PLoS representative mentioned the PLoS One's attempt to set up a post-publication peer review system. The representative hoped that the post-publication peer review might, in time, replace the current peer review system. I didn't think about this before, but it is actually a good idea. By experimenting with the comment/rating systems and gathering around the journal a large community, PLoS One might actually come up with a good and effective community peer review system.
OpenWetWare was presented as an example of open science, exchange of protocols and projects in a wiki format. The projects seems to be growing nicely, currently only limited by the scope of biomedical research (more about OpenWetWare below).
A universal ID is seen as way to track and give credit to other forms of participation other than just accepted manuscripts.
In general, my feeling from this discussion and from talking with some other people during the breaks, there is a lot of resistance from the biomedical research to try out new things and to open up. I had the impression that several of the people I talked too agree that the trend will be towards more open science but that this will take generational change. What I could not really understand and I could not get anyone really to explain me was why there is no commonly used pre-print server in biology. The basic answer is that there is just to much competition and announcing a manuscript in a pre-print server is asking to be scooped.
How do we empower/inspire/reach the next generation - This was a nice, around the table, discussion about what can be done to make kids more curious and independent thinkers. We talked about some of the little things that we all believe triggered our interest in our current activities. Things like sci-fi, chemistry kits, legos, taking things apart, model rockets, etc. I was surprised to know that it is not possible to get a chemistry kit for kids in the USA today. I heard from some cool educational programs people knew from their countries.
Saturday I had a chat with Jason Kelly from OpenWetWare and Taylor from The Synaptic Leap. I tried to represent a bit Nodalpoint in this discussion as we talked about the different models of the communities (the major difference being the wiki or blog model). They are both interested in setting up more interchange and collaboration between the communities. Greg and others, what do you think about it ? Setting up a nodalpoint wiki in OpenWetWare ? Some way to post request for collaboration or share protocols across communities ?
Sunday
Second Life demo - Pathfinder walked us through Second Life and some practical examples of educational efforts in the virtual world. He showed amazing examples of life size reconstructions of archaeological discoveries from Egypt, a rocket exhibition with a trip to outer space, and spaces for virtual conferences. This looks like a potential interesting environment for scientific presentations, whenever the 3D richness allows for better communication. In my view the problem is going to be, as with anything on the web, to get people to participate.
Unfortunately I had to go catch the plain back to Germany so I missed the wrapping up of the meeting in the afternoon. Overall it was very stimulating although the big number of parallel sessions made me miss several interesting talks and discussions.
