I received an invitation to SciFoo (a “Science F riends o f O ’Reilly” meeting) in the beginning of April this year. I was aware of the hype around this “unconference” and several people I knew had already participated, so at first I was rather excited and flattered about the invitation. However, I was in Germany, the meeting was at Google headquarters in Palo Alto, California and the flight was not covered.

Google Wave has got an awful lot of people quite excited. And others are more sceptical. A lot of SciFoo attendees were therefore very excited to be able to get an account on the developer sandbox as part of the weekend. At the opening plenary Stephanie Hannon gave a demo of Wave and, although there were numerous things that didn’t work live, that was enough to get more people interested.

As I mentioned yesterday and Shirley Wu picked up on, the final session of Science Blogging 2008 offered a challenge to the audience (and to anyone else) to get more senior scientists blogging. The official announcement is now live – and a free trip to next year’s Science Foo Camp the ultimate prize.

So Michael Nielsen, one morning at breakfast at Scifoo asked one of those questions which never has a short answer; ‘So how did you get into this open science thing?’ and I realised that although I have told the story to many people I haven’t ever written it down.

One of the many great pleasures of SciFoo was to meet with people who had a different, and in many cases much more comprehensive, view of managing data and making it available.

I am too tired to write anything even vaguely coherent. As will have been obvious there was little opportunity for microblogging, I managed to take no video at all, and not even any pictures. It was non-stop, at a level of intensity that I have very rarely encountered anywhere before.

*Written on the train on the way from Barcelona to Grenoble. This life really is a lot less exotic than it sounds…*  The workshop that I’ve reported on over the past few days was both positive and inspiring. There is a real sense that the ideas of Open Access and Open Data are becoming mainstream.