I've been experimenting with using a wiki as a lab book after seeing your talks at Manchester and SciBlog08. - Michael Barton
Michael it was really nice to meet you in person in Manchester! Having discussions on FriendFeed is convenient but nothing can replace a conversation in a pub and over dinner... I look forward to hearing about your wiki experiments - Jean-Claude Bradley
some good points in there - getting used to a lot of these features in smaller free online friendly conferences makes it harder when attending old school conferences like ACS - Jean-Claude Bradley
The easiest part to change in a traditional science conference is probably the blogging part. Some of the conferences I attend have policies that make me avoid liveblogging or blogging in too much detail. - Martin Fenner
a big problem with ACS is no wireless access, which tends to discourage liveblogging :) - Jean-Claude Bradley
To be entirely fair, its not the fault of the meeting organizers. The largest convention centers are not built to accommodate wireless easily. The administrators of those facilities farm it out to third party providers who are charging exorbitant prices.(Unions also drive up costs here) Even a small conference such as the one my organization runs (250 people) could be charged thousands of dollars to provide the wireless to attendees. The economics are just this side of prohibitive. - Jill O'Neill
some great ideas, including clarity about what is and is not bloggable. Also, the comment about speed dating is a good one - I went to a "speed dating" type activity at ASIS&T last year & met someone whom I now consider a trusted friend -- and co-presenter at a recent conference. - Stephanie•CogSciLibrarian
"Scientific conferences are essential both for the exchange of ideas and for networking. But they don’t have to be organized the same way as 10-20 years ago." Web 2.0 tools are now allowing us to share, communicate and develop new ideas in ways that makes learning, collaborating and researching so much fun! Use of 'Open Conference System' http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ocs is an excellent thought. Just wondering if there have any conferences conducted using this system. - Jay Bhatt
A list of conferences using "Open Conference Systems": http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs-conferen.... Speed geeking is apparently related to speed dating: a rapid succession of 5 min presentations. - Martin Fenner
Pullquote: "CollabRx builds and operates Virtual Biotechs for foundations and patients who urgently seek cures for their diseases. Working with these foundations and research institutions, CollabRx
* builds teams of top researchers
* facilitates planning of a strategic road map
* brings best practices to therapy development
* manages the execution of the plan
The CollabRx research platform connects researchers to one another and to a network of scientific services, providing unprecedented opportunities for knowledge sharing and economies of scale." - Bill Hooker
Need to look into this again. It's been on my to do list for far too long - Deepak
I tried to request sponsorship from them for the PSB open science workshop but no response after one reminder. I may try one more time I guess - Shirley Wu
The exciting news to me is that the "public" is interested in this. The article is being, clipped, dug, etc. - Nice Fish Films
Most excellent -- one quibble, I'd like to see "no insider information" credited to Jean-Claude. - Bill Hooker
well thanks Bill - the author removed it after some reformatting of the original paragraph :) I didn't ask for it to be removed - I have no problem with that paragraph - Jean-Claude Bradley
so you think that private company will always permits to their scientist to share data with the rest of the world? - Piero Giacomelli
@Piero: some will, some won't. The hypothesis is that the sharing model will prove more efficient, so early adopters will realize an advantage and eventually the mainstream will adopt their methods. There are no guarantees but I think it's worth testing the hypothesis. - Bill Hooker
Depends on the information. Pharma companies are already sharing pre-competitive information. Stuff that they would need to repeat in the absence of any data availability. With things like GWAS, it might be impossible to do for a company, so they will collaborate with universities and make the raw data public (e.g. Novartis) - Deepak
Expression data (eQTL) too. See Rosetta/Merck. - Chris Cotsapas
@Chris, oops. Should have included that one esp cause I have used that in talks :) (I was at Rosetta Biosoftware) - Deepak
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media May 2009, San Francisco Bay Area "This interdisciplinary conference brings together researchers and industry leaders interested in creating and analyzing social media." - Richard Akerman
Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard for the secure and reliable distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms around the world. CutePDF Writer (formerly CutePDF Printer) is the free version of commercial PDF creation software. It creates a version 5 PDF document. Requires PS2PDF converter such as Ghostscript - jokrausdu
Very interesting. But maybe, it seems overly negative on the free licenses? And although public domain is great I am not sure why it would be easier to convince everyone to publish public domain data than to convince everyone to publish CC-BY data? - Anders Norgaard
Anders - read John Wilbanks blog and Nature precedings version of this piece (and conceivably one or two of mine) plus Deepak on the problem of 'licensing' data. But John is the best on this. The simplest example I can give is this: if you want to do a presentation which includes three images from flicker one is CC-BY-SA and one is CC-BY-NC-SA. You can't do this with copyright violation. NOw imagine combining that with public domain data, database rights, GPL software and its frightening. - Cameron Neylon
If everything is PD then you can go ahead and do this. I strongly beleive that even enforcing attribution is a bad thing. Best done through social norms which can adjust to allow 'in the spirit' practical consequences whereas legal documents can't. The bottom line is that if you 'license' data you are creating a complication that will ultimately _prevent_ people using it the way you want - Cameron Neylon
Let's start with some definitions: what is a "network", what is a "collaborative tool", who are "scientists" and what does it mean "social"? What current sites, services and pieces of software count as "social networking tools for scientists"? Just those emulating Facebook? Databases? Journals? - Bora Zivkovic
All good questions, maybe we can have a first hack at them tomorrow at BBC/online here? - Cameron Neylon
I was thinking about writing a blog post about it, but had no time this week and will be in NYC while you guys are at SciFoo, so perhaps we can chat here and then post later on our blogs? - Bora Zivkovic
Great points by Bora - we don't even think about how these things are defined, we just parrot the buzzwords - Neil Saunders
Just don't say "social media" for scientists, or you'll be able to hear me scream from Seattle - Deepak
This is a central problem of all sites that implement social features, not just science sites, most of which are hopelessly web 0.9. Hence the rise of things like Facebook Connect and Google Friends. The best that we can hope for is that developers employ things like openID and better yet shared (professional) profiles like from epernicus.com. - Todd Harris
The contrary view would be that there are already significant efforts underway in standardizing this, and effort would be better spent in writing software and/or building communities - Nick Lothian
I think centralisation and decentralisation are inevitable ebbs and flows of computer systems. For a network to hit critical mass it needs to either manage to be a strange attractor for an interesting group, or offer enough new functionality (like FriendFeed) to bring people in who are already doing things elsewhere. - Richard Akerman
@Neil this is why I thought focussing on the existing sites might be useful rather than taking some grant philosophical position. @Bora I think chat here and/or on Google Doc and then update as we go around. Question as to whether it is worth putting this up as a session at BBC/SciFoo as well? - Cameron Neylon
I second what Nick said. The open social graph will happen, science networks really shouldn't be doing their own thing too... OTOH microformats and FOAF being available along with hashed email addresses would help. - Euan
@Euan @Nick I agree absolutely, that's why I'm pushing for adopting more widely used platforms, while looking at useful features and what people actually use. - Cameron Neylon
I think we should start supporting the standards and APIs that already exist, mainly the standard features that every social networking site needs. Those that don't will probably be left behind. - Martin Fenner
@Cameron - what do you mean by "adopting more widely used platforms"? Platforms as in standards? Or platforms as in software products? I agree with adopting standards, but not about software products (I'm somewhat biased, as I develop a product in this space). I don't think the market is ready for product consolidation yet - there are still too many new features being created, which makes it hard to pick winners. Plus, there's the whole hosted offering (Ning etc) vs installable software debate to consider. - Nick Lothian
@Nick good questions. I didn't mean software products because I don't think the right ones exist, but standards certainly. As for installable versus hosted my personal view is that something along the Wordpress model is a good route. There will be plenty of people with the skills and wish to deploy locally and plenty without the skills or resources to do it. In the end though I don't see this as a single product but as a platform. Essentially that means a data standard and tranport mechanisms of some sort. - Cameron Neylon
@Cameron Well that's easy then. HTTP+Atom+XFN+The OpenSocial REST APIs and datamodel+OpenID+OAuth - Nick Lothian
In terms of open standards/transports, it might make sense to also discuss XMPP Publish-Subscribe/Jabber (http://www.xmpp.org/). There's been some recent discussion on how it may be a better fit for some social applications than HTTP/ATOM. I found this presentation instructive: http://www.slideshare.net/rabb... - Fitzgerald Steele
Very good. I wonder which site(s) will survive. Facebook? Do you have OpenSocial or at least some API support on your checklist? - Martin Fenner
Another addition: http://eventseer.net, which is a site for keeping track of computer science conferences and events - and we're expanding into other academic disciplines later this year. It has social networking elements, but the main focus is on the comprehensive events database: The social graph is so far entirely mined from event participation and published papers. - Thomas Brox Røst
Commented at the source but realized maybe should have commented here. The gist was that I think it is very hard to build a network if you bill it as such. Rather, build a tool that is useful even without a network - eventually the network will be there and the network effects will come with relatively little effort. - Shirley Wu
@Martin Yes, API is a crucial one, will add to the list. And will add eventseer. Shirley, I agree absolutely, you need to have a compelling service, and then a network can build itself around that. Where I think the point has been missed is that people think Fb for scientists is a great idea but don't think about _what_ people will want to share so much. - Cameron Neylon
@Richard. :) Trying very hard not to annoy people with this post but I suspect I may po a few people anyway... - Cameron Neylon
@Thomas, check, added to the list on the googledoc - Cameron Neylon
@Richard, added research blogging, and a new category for blog aggregators generally, are there other examples beyond PostGenomic, ChemicalBlogspcae and research blogging (I'm not going to include simple blog aggregations such as e.g DNA network but am going to try and restrict it to things that add value beyond just collecting a set of blogs together) - Cameron Neylon
Great idea Cameron. It's no secret that I don't think "Facebook for scientists" is the way to go and it's about time we did a critical assessment of these services. - Neil Saunders
I think its a question of making sure we extract some value from what exists but also hopefully that developers and funders don't get discouraged from making new tools when some of these start going belly up - Cameron Neylon
I really learned a lot from Jean-Claude's presentation that he delivered during Drexel University Libraries' Annual symposium on Scholarly Communication. Please also refer to http://scholar2scholar.wikispa... for notes taken during the 'Roundtable Discussion' and 'Further Reading' section for web resources on Web 2.0 and Scholarly Communication when you get a chance. - Jay Bhatt
