Cameron Neylon

I'm a little shell shocked really. I've spent the last couple of weeks
running around like a lunatic, being at meetings, organising meetings,
flying out to other meetings. And then flying back to try and catch up
with all the things that need doing before the next flurry of activity
strikes (which involves less travel and more experiments you will be
pleased to know). There are two things I desperately need to write up.

The [Open Science workshop at
Southampton](http://sotonopensciworkshop.wikispaces.com/) on September 1
seemed to be well received and was certainly interesting for me.Â 
Despite having a very diverse group of people we did seem to manage to
have a sensible discussion that actually came to some conclusions. This
was followed up by discussions with the web publishing group at Nature
where some of these ideas were refined -- more on this will follow!

Following on from this (and with a quick afternoon jaunt to Bristol for
the [Bristol Knowlege
Unconference](http://knowledgeunconference.eventwax.com/bristol-knowledge-unconference)
on the evening of September 5 I flew to Toronto en route to Waterloo for
[Science in the 21st Century](http://www.science21stcentury.org/),
allowing for a brief stop for a Nature Network Toronto [pub night panel
session](http://network.nature.com/forums/toronto/2368) with [Jen
Dodd](http://jendodd.com/), [Michael
Nielsen](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/), and [Timo
Hannay](http://network.nature.com/profile/timo). The organisers of
Science21, but in particular [Sabine
Hossenfelder](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/), deserve huge
congratulations for putting together one of the most diverse and
exciting conferences I have ever been to. With speakers from historians
to sociologists, hedge fund managers to writers, and even the odd
academic scientist the sheer breadth of material covered was quite
breathtaking.

You can see most of the talks and associated material on the [Perimeter
Institute Seminar Archive](http://pirsa.org/) page
[here](http://pirsa.org/C08021). The friendfeed commentary is also
available in the [science21
room](http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science21). Once again it was a great
pleasure to meet people I kind of knew but hadn't ever actually met such
as [Greg Wilson](http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/) and [John
Dupuis](http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/) as well as to meet new people
including (but by no means limited to) [Harry
Collins](http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/academicstaff/C-D/professor-harry-collins-overview.html),
[Paul Guinnessy](http://www.ostina.org/content/view/2024/), and [David
Kaiser](http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/). We have yet to establish
whether I knew [Jen Dodd](http://jendodd.com/) in a previous life...

Very many ideas will come out of this meeting I think -- and I have no
doubt you will see some interesting blog posts from others with the
science21 tag coming out over the next few weeks and months. A couple of
particular things I will try to follow up on;

- Harry Collins [spoke about](http://pirsa.org/08090033/)
  categorisations of tacit (i.e. non-communicated) knowledge and how
  these relate to different categories of expertise. This has obvious
  implications for our mission to describe our experiments to a level
  where there is 'no insider information'. The idea that we may be able
  to rationally describe what we can and cannot expect to be able to
  communicate and that we can therefore concentrate on the things that
  we can is compelling.
- Greg Wilson [made a strong case](http://pirsa.org/08090037/) for the
  fully supported experiment that echoed my own thoughts about the
  recording of data analysis procedures. He was focussed on
  computational science but I think his point goes much wider than that.
  This requires some thought and processing but for me it is clear that
  the big challenge in communicating the details of our experiments now
  clearly lies in communicating *process* rather than data.

Each of these deserves its own post and will hopefully get it. And I am
also aware that I owe many of you comments, replies, or other things --
some more urgent than others. I'll be getting to them as soon as I can
dig myself out from under this pile of......


I’m a little shell shocked really. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks running around like a lunatic, being at meetings, organising meetings, flying out to other meetings.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

The long slow catchup…