Cameron Neylon

Last Friday afternoon (was it really only a week ago?) about 200 people
made their way to the Googleplex in Mountain View for the fourth
[SciFoo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp). There are many
people who got their blog posts out well before me so I will focus on
the sessions which don't seem to have been heavily discussed and try to
draw a few themes out.

For me, the over riding theme that came through was Engagement. Engaging
people beyond the narrow confines of the professional research community
in real research projects, making science more engaging for students,
and engaging in a serious way with both the tools that are available to
help us do these things, and increasingly with data generation and
dissemination processes that are not under our control.

I was involved in running two sessions. The first with [Peter
Murray-Rust](http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust) was on Open
Data, focussed on getting feedback on the current form of the [Panton
Principles](http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1939) and has
been [blogged in detail by
Peter.](http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2191) For me the
main message from this was a lack of push-back. Many of the more
technical people in the room were bemused that there was a problem.
"Just put it on the web" was a common response. Other's were concerned
about where data stops and creative works begin but the main message for
me was that "for published data just put it explicitly in the public
domain" was seen as the right thing to do by the people in the room.
Indeed most were suprised it was even worth discussing.

The second session I ran was on [Google Wave](http://wave.google.com) in
research and this will get a whole post of its own very soon so I won't
discuss it in detail here. Suffice to say that there was excitement,
great ideas about what could be done, and concerns about the details of
technical implementation. Which to me seems like an excellent mix to
make progress with. Engagement for these two sessions was engagement
with the data and engagement with the technology for generating,
annotating, and sharing that data.

The other sessions I would like to draw a common theme through were more
focussed on public engagement and education. The first session I
attended on Saturday morning was run by [Daniel
Glaser](http://www.danielglaser.org/) called Doing Science in
Non-Science Spaces. This was an interesting discussion on many levels
but particularly for me because it challenged my ideas about
multi-disciplinary working and deploying research projects into an
educational setting. Daniel described disciplinary boundaries as fractal
and described multidisciplinary projects as requiring as space where
people can come together in a safe common space to share ideas, but also
a requirement for people to then disperse again and re-intepret the
outputs in the context of their own experience and discipline. In this
view disciplinary boundaries are important in enabling effective
summarisation and communication of outputs. I've been kicking myself
ever since for not thinking to ask whether that means these boundaries
are any less arbitrary than those of us who are interdisciplinary always
feel.

Another challenge to my thinking from this session was the need to give
up control over the shared collaboration space. In thinking about
putting research projects into educational settings I've always looked
at the process as trying to find a question within the research that can
be understood and answered by students. The argument here was that to
truly engage students it would be necessary to let them find and answer
their own questions. I'm not sure how in practice to think about that in
terms of drug discovery or how it maps on the success of projects like
[Galaxy Zoo](http://www.galaxyzoo.org/) but it bears some thinking
about.

Also focussed on interactions beyond the professional research community
was [Ariel Waldman](http://arielwaldman.com/)'s session "Open
collaboration between scientists, communities, and the unknown" which
followed on from a session of the same title at SciBarCamp which I
somehow missed. Here the focus was on problems with sharing research
with the wider world, with similar problems to those of sharing between
researchers identified,Â  and potential solutions. Some great projects
were discussed and showcased with contributions on a new [collaboration
site for research into Parkinsons](http://www.pdonlineresearch.org/),
getting the public to search for surface exposed fossils in high
resolution ground images ([Louise
Leakey](http://www.leakey.com/louise_leakey.htm), [Turkana Basin
Institute](http://turkanabasin.org/)), and the experience of being the
public conduit for a spacecraft from Veronica "[Mars
Phoenix](http://twitter.com/marsphoenix)"
[McGregor](http://twitter.com/VeronicaMcG). Once again a major theme was
"just get the data out there" so that people *can* do something with it
if they want to. If it isn't available no-one is going to do anything.

The final session was lead by [Joan
Peckham](http://www.cs.uri.edu/about-us/people/joan-peckham/) on
Computational Thinking, the idea that the principles behind good
computing design should be taught as a core skill on a par with reading
and writing, and that this techniques are widely applicable beyond
computing per se. For more on the background to this you can checkout
[John Udell](http://blog.jonudell.net) [interviewing
Joan](http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/05/04/talking-with-joan-peckham-about-computational-thinking/)
on his [Interviews with
Innovators](http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/series/innovators.html)
podcast. The point for me was to try and understand how I can most
effectively learn these principles and techniques as it is clear to me
that I need a better understanding of good software and system design
for the work I would like to do. What was interesting to me was whether
my needs mapped onto what would be required for teaching children and
whether willing and interested guinea pigs such as myself might be
useful in helping to develop educational programmes. Here engagement
means effective use of technology and design of systems that will make
our work and collaborations efficient.

Scifoo is always challenging, requiring that you re-think and re-examine
many of the assumptions that your everyday work is built on. Many smart
people with very different perspectives and experiences make a great
environment to stress test your ideas, sometimes to destruction. The
challenge can be actually applying those insights in the real world with
limited resources and time. But it provides some goals to work towards
and much food for thought.


Last Friday afternoon (was it really only a week ago?) about 200 people made their way to the Googleplex in Mountain View for the fourth SciFoo. There are many people who got their blog posts out well before me so I will focus on the sessions which don’t seem to have been heavily discussed and try to draw a few themes out. For me, the over riding theme that came through was Engagement.

Rogue Scholar Posts

Sci – Bar – Foo etc. Part II – SciFoo – Engaging with the world