Anton and I can’t be happier, or more proud, of what this conference achieved. More than anything, we are astounded by the openness with which so many people came together to share, explore, question, listen and narrate in order to reflect the importance of science in their lives and how the Web can be used to share their passions for science. See my post, Making it real: People and Books and Web and Science at ScienceOnline2010 (and please give us your feedback through this form).

Our gratitude goes to all who attended the conference and participated so energetically in the conversations there.

And special thanks goes to the following individuals and organizations that helped us grow and improve this conference. Please thank them for making ScienceOnline2010 possible — click through to their sites to learn more about each person or organization. (We thanked the sponsors of ScienceOnline’09 here, the second event here and the first event here.):

Our host

Sigma Xi was founded in 1886 to honor excellence in scientific investigation and encourage a sense of companionship and cooperation among researchers in all fields of science and engineering. For the third year in a row, Sigma Xi opened its beautiful center for our use, and Meg Murphy and Michael Heisel made sure we had everything we needed.

Our institutional partner

The Contemporary Science Center is a catalyst for transforming science education in North Carolina, using innovative models of teaching and learning to inspire teachers and students statewide to embrace scientific engagement. When we went looking for an organization to handle our accounting (as individuals, Anton and I can’t accept foundation grants and donations), CSC Executive Director Pamela Blizzard enthusiastically agreed to help. Her center is based in a hands-on learning lab in the building of our ScienceOnline’09 institutional partner, the Museum of Life and Science, and it’s a perfect place to encourage high school students to get the science bug.

Our sponsors

Even amid the economic bad times facing our country, we were able to attract repeat and new sponsors who dramatically helped us grow the conference. Sponsoring organizations included the following:

Burroughs Wellcome Fund, an independent private foundation dedicated to advancing the biomedical sciences by supporting research and other scientific and educational activities, not only repeated its support of our conference for the fourth year in a row, it increased its past generous grants by 50 percent this time around. Their substantial support helped us bring New Yorker science writer Michael Specter to the conference as keynote speaker. Russ Campbell, communications officer, has long been a friend to the conference, and we’re indebted to him for his cheerleading for our annual conference and his leadership in forming the Science Communicators of North Carolina (along with scientist and science writer Chris Brodie).

Last year, the Research Triangle Foundation, the granddaddy of science parks in the U.S., helped us even our accounts with a last-minute grant. This year, RTP stepped in as a major sponsor and host of our opening reception. Not only did they provide funding, logistical support and a welcoming opening-night party, but CEO Rick Weddle, Tina Valdecanas, Cara Rousseau and Jordan Mendys also offered important ideas and contacts that helped us make the conference run so smoothly. They also rolled up their sleeves Saturday and Sunday and took over important tasks at the registration table and video cameras.

Over the last year, RTP has also been an important supporter of Science In the Triangle, an evolving experiment in community science journalism and scientific-community organizing. The crew behind SITT was instrumental in helping us make ScienceOnline2010 a much more professional endeavor — witness the nice programs and donor poster designed by Tessa Perrien, the conference iPhone app programmed by Ben Schell and Seth Peterson, the video support by Ross Maloney, and of course the strategic consulting by Christopher Perrien. Sabine Vollmer and DeLene Beeland, contributors to the SITT blog, also provided some great coverage of the conference in addition to their posts about science in this region.

Tricia Kenny of Invitrogen pinged us late one night to ask if that life sciences company could sponsor the conference, and then offered to help us in some very creative ways. These included a cash grant to provide lunch on Saturday, as well as making the cool name badges, providing the tote bags and giving us a large sum to purchase Flip video cameras (through the Flip Spotlight program) that we gave out to video volunteers to record interviews at the conference and back at home.

Google Sidewiki similarly provided a cash grant and ways to win a chrome Flip Mino HD — Community manager Natalie Villalobos ran a contest during the conference to encourage posting to Sidewiki, and among the winners of the Google Flips were the eight high school students from Staten Island Academy, who each won a camera for their many and insightful comments.

RTI International, one of the world’s leading independent, nonprofit research and development organizations, returned as a sponsor, and also hosted a lab tour. RTI is an important corporate citizen in the Triangle, and we were happy they returned as a sponsor.

APCO Worldwide, a communications and public affairs consulting agency, recently sent David Wescott to the Triangle, and when his friends Elle and Jonathan, who have attended the conference multiple times, suggested he help with some sponsorship dollars, he came through just in time to help fund the extra shuttles we arranged to improve transportation between our conference venues.

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, which facilitates broadly synthetic research to address fundamental questions in evolutionary biology, participated as a sponsor by providing travel grants to two contest winners (learn more here), as well as paying for the Locopops & cookies treat during the conference.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science Magazine, also provided a cash grant — and online editor Stewart Wills also brought cool genome t-shirts (modeled here) for the giveaway table.

The North Carolina Biotechnology Center, which seeks to provide long-term economic and societal benefits to North Carolina by supporting biotechnology research, business and education statewide, three-peated its support with a biotechnology event sponsorship grant.

Writer-researcher Pat Campbell of Campbell-Kibler Associates had planned to attend the conference again, and sent a cash grant. When her travel plans changed and she could no longer attend, she insisted we keep the money and use it to help some of our discussion leaders with travel stipends.

CrossRef promotes the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scholarly research. They were a sponsor of the 2008 conference, and returned this time around with another cash grant.

Katie Mosher arranged for a donation from North Carolina Sea Grant, which provides research, education and outreach opportunities relating to current issues affecting the North Carolina coast and its communities. Benjamin Young Landis also helped stuff the grab bags and drive people to lab tours.

Event hosts and partners

On Thursday, we gathered at Alivia’s Bistro in Durham to listen to stories with The Monti, a fantastic storytelling organization spearheaded by our friend Jeff Polish. Vanessa Woods, Scott Huler, Amanda Lamb, Rob Dunn and John Kessel delighted us with their true stories about inspiration.

On Friday, RTP hosted workshops in the Park Research Center, Counter Culture Coffee welcomed a group to their weekly coffee cupping, and afternoon lab tours were hosted by the Duke Lemur Center, the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment, the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, the Museum of Life and Science (thanks Larry Boles for driving a van at the last minute!) and RTI. Many thanks to Cara Rousseau for facilitating the workshops and to Nancy Shepherd for coordinating the lab tours. And Friday night, of course, was our RTP-hosted opening reception and keynote talk by Michael Specter, noted above.

On Saturday and Sunday, more than 100 individuals participated as session moderators, discussion leaders and Ignite presenters. See the official ScienceOnline2010 program page to learn more about these talented people who provided their experiences or perspectives as a way to spark the session conversations. Thanks also to David Kroll for organizing the Saturday dinner (losing his voice in the process), to Kevin Zelnio and Andrew Thaler for emceeing the Ignite talks, to Steve Burnett for his tech support during the talks, and to Rebecca Skloot for coordinating the books giveaway (over the course of the conference, we gave away copies of books by Skloot, Specter, Huler, Carl Zimmer, Eric Roston and Felice Frankel, among others).

The generosity of our sponsors, noted above, also helped us pay for full wifi services at Sigma Xi on Saturday and Sunday. We met the guys behind SignalShare at the Social Media Business Forum a few months back, and right away knew we needed them at our conference. We can’t say enough about the service SignalShare provided — and not just the great wifi coverage that allowed us to use more than 25 gigabytes of bandwidth in less than 48 hours, but also the above-and-beyond help Joe Costanzo and Greg Hoffman gave, such as emptying garbage cans and answering countless technical questions from session moderators. These guys are talented, hard working and simply the nicest guys we’ve met.

Many thanks also to Andrea Novicki of the Duke Center for Instructional Technology for arranging the loan of four laptop computers.

Grab bag of science swag

We continued our tradition of providing all attendees with a “grab bag of science swag” filled with science materials and resources. Organizations, companies and individuals donated materials, including: Harper Collins, NobelPrize.org, NASA, Duke Medicine, and others.

Our volunteers

Elle Cayabyab Gitlin was right where we knew she’d be, sitting at the registration table welcoming all of our attendees to the conference. This year Leah Gordon joined her. Lots of others helped out throughout the weekend, stuffing the grab bags, offering rides, organizing the swag table, keeping us on track, cleaning up and much more. Thank you to you all.

Food and coffee

Meals and refreshments were catered by the following: Fetzko Coffees kept us swimming in coffee and espresso drinks with their cool Kona Chameleon coffee truck, Crumb baked the morning muffins, Saladelia Cafe and Mediterranean Deli” catered the lunches, Locopops made the popsicles (thank you Lenore Ramm for facilitating and NESCent for paying), Whole Foods made the cookies and donated bottles of water, and OnlyBurger slung the burgers.

The organizers

And finally, a word of thanks to Anton Zuiker, without whom this series of conferences would have never taken off the ground, who tirelessly pursued sponsors, kept the book-keeping straight (and made sure we kept within the budget and had the budget to begin with), kept us all on schedule, and in general kept everything coordinated and calm even at times when my ADHD self was going crazy. And he did the hard parts of the organization while I enjoyed myself blogging and tweeting and plotting sessions with the blogospheric and scientific superstars. He is the best conference-organizing partner ever. Hard and stresfull work tends to make relationships sour, but with Anton each year and each ScienceOnline just brings us together closer in our friendship. David Kroll and Stephanie Willen Brown also provided help and ideas throughout the year.

Last, but certainly not least, we thank Catharine Zivkovic and Erin Shaughnessy Zuiker for their forebearance, patience and support as we organized this conference.

And with that, we thank each and every one of you for your roles, big and small, in making this a most memorable conference. A toast of slivovitz to you!

People

You cannot see the feedback that many participants at ScienceOnline2010 have already provided to Anton and me (keep them coming – we take the responses very seriously), but the recurring theme for the “highlight of the conference” question was “Meeting the People”; and the main request for the future is “provide more time for informal conversations”.

You will see even more of that kind of sentiment if you peruse the growing list of blog coverage. Or glean it from photographs posted on Flickr and Picasa here, here, here, here and here. Or on YouTube videos here and here….

While Early Bird Dinner, Friday Workshops, Coffee Cupping, Lab/Museum Tours, Friday gala, long lunch breaks, evenings at the hotel bar, and Saturday banquet were all good opportunities for mingling and schmoozing and networking, obviously people crave even more, and we will try to make sure to provide even more such opportunities next year. Your suggestions as to how to do this are welcome.

As the conference is growing, each year I get to meet many people I have only interacted online before. And for over 90% of them, as soon as they walk in I recognize them from their pictures on blogs and Facebook or their Twitter avatars, and squeal and jump and hug them as if seeing a long-lost friend. That is exactly how it feels. Some online denizens spill a lot of their personal life, glories and worries, on their blogs. But even those who write ‘serious’ blogs and never post anything personal or introspective, perhaps do not realize how much of their personality seeps through between the lines. And it is quite incredible how offline personalities match online personalities – no matter how hard one tries to concoct an artificial online persona, the real person comes through and is recognizable in Real Life at first Hello.

There were 267 people there. If I spent an hour with everyone, that would take almost two weeks with little-to-no sleep. Not having that much time, I at least tried to say Hello to everyone (almost succeeded!). Even a brief handshake and a smile is enough to put a human face to an online name and to make future online interactions more meaningful.

The importance of meeting online friends in real life is something that Anton Zuiker has instilled in all us locals here over the years. The BlogTogether is his brainchild – the unofficial organization of local (Triangle NC) bloggers that has over the years organized numerous meetups, Long Tables, and conferences, including the 2005 Bloggercon (where Anton and I first met – he was wondering who this n00b was sitting next to Dave Winer, not that I had any idea at the time who Dave Winer was), 2006 Podcastercon, and the four ScienceOnline conferences in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Out of the small band of early adopters in the region grew a huge community of people who use the Web in various ways. And everyone craves the human touch and face-to-face contact. Just check the Social Carolina calendar – so many opportunities for online folks to meet in meatspace. There is a regular Triangle Tweetup, and Ignite Raleigh and soon the first TEDxRTP, there are monthly Techie Tuesdays at the RTP headquarters, not to mention all the smaller ad hoc gatherings. More specifically to science, there is now a large organization of Science Communicators of North Carolina, most of whom do at least part of their work online, and we have recently started Science In The Triangle website and blog where we announce, and subsequently report, on science and technology events and news in the area.

We kicked off the conference program on Saturday morning with a session on the importance of meatspace, science freelancing, science motels and coworking. One of the moderators of that session, Brian Russell, runs Carrboro Creative Coworking space, and the PRC building where we held the Friday workshops was just waiting for the conference to be over before it undergoes a complete redesign and renovation to become the second coworking space in the Triangle, focused on science and technology. The importance of face-to-face interactions was noted in several other sessions. And the BlogTogether spirit permeated the entire meeting.

Books

Who would have thunk that books would be such a hit at a gathering of Web evangelists (many of whom probably have Kindles and are salivating at the prospect of laying their hands on the iSlate)! But it was. There were two sessions dedicated to the topic, both often mentioned as “my favourite session” by the attendees. See some excellent coverage of those by Jennifer, Morgan, Eric and an entire series of posts by Brian.

Months ago, when I was putting together the program schedule and trying to assign rooms for session, I did not predict that books would be such a hot topic. It is totally my mistake, for which I apologize, for assigning one of these sessions to the small room.

The books included in the swag bags were quite a hit – and not just with us old fogies, but also with the younger set: Miss Baker’s high school students who went home with quite a loot! A number of people brought books for the book-exchange table in the back of the room, and if I am correct, all the books found new owners.

Many book authors were present, as well as bloggers who snagged book deals recently. Several brought (or had their publishers send) free copies of their books to the conference and were at the ready to sign them for the lucky winners. Durham’s Regulator Bookshop sold many copies of Michael Specter’s ‘Denialism’ and Felice Frankel’s ‘No Small Matter’ at the Friday Gala and ten lucky attendees at the gala got copies of ‘Denialism’ by raffle.

During Saturday banquet, books (including more ‘Denialism’ and ‘No Small Matter’, several copies of ‘Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot, ‘Newton and the Counterfeiter’ by Tom Levenson, ‘The Carbon Age’ by Eric Roston, ‘The Tangled Bank’ by Carl Zimmer, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ by Henry Gee, and several copies of 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions of Open Laboratory anthologies) went to the winners of Twitter Trivia Contest held in-between Ignite talks. The questions were about stuff said at the meeting earlier in the day and the guests tweeted their answers. We could all see on the screen who got the correct answers first. Some answers were very funny, and the people following from outside were confused with a flurry of short, seemingly meaningless tweets referring to duck penises and such. The toughest question was “what do Anton and Bora drink to celebrate the successful ending of the conference each year?” – only four people got it right (slivovitz – the fastest tweeter was John McKay, probably the person at the conference I waited the longest to finally meet in person – six years!) and no, it’s not Carl Zimmer’s blood.

On Friday, everyone signed the conference board and those whose signatures were covered by the dice won the remaining books:

Finally, those who could not get the books by luck, had to resort to blackmail…

So, why are dead-tree books so popular with the online set? No idea! But perhaps there is something real about a book that kindles and slates and tablets and iPhones don’t have. Just like a conversation with a person while sitting at the same table feels more real than the conversation with the same person online (though the online dialogue may well be much more information-rich), it seems like a book feels more real than the electronic book reader. Both are objects of about the same size and weight, both have words on a page to be read – yet there is something more intimate about the paper book. You may read an eBook on an airplane or during daily commute on a train, but you want an old-timey book to take with you to the beach, or to snuggle with at home under the covers. Will that feeling disappear in another generation or two? I don’t know.

But if this sentiment persists for another year, perhaps we can organize something more next year, perhaps find all the published authors in the list of registrants in advance and get copies of everyone’s book for giveaways and other stuff – suggestions are welcome.

Twitter

One thing that happened between last year’s conference and this one was the explosion of Twitter. While collecting information about all the participants I also linked to their Twitter accounts and put together a Twitter List of all the participants. Obviously, a very large proportion of attendees were going to use Twitter, and many others were curious to follow the proceedings using this channel.

Anticipating this, we determined the hashtag (#scio10) early on and started our own Twitter account which, with 568 followers, obviously attracted many more people than just the participants.

In previous years, wifi was nice, but (except for moderators/presenters) not necessary. But this year, with everyone trying to tweet, wifi was essential. So we hired the pros – the amazing guys from SignalShare who made sure we were swimming in bandwidth and will also provide us with stats in a couple of weeks, which we may share with you later – for now: we transmitted 25 gigabytes of data over 2 days!

Not just that everyone could tweet and liveblog at all times, but session moderators got bold and logged into SecondLife in one session, and Skyped in guest speakers in two sessions (Science And Entertainment, and Open Access in the Developing World) without a glitch. Not to mention that (almost) all sessions were recorded (videos will be on YouTube shortly – a professional is editing them right now) and several were livestreamed on Ustream and a couple into SecondLife.

[Twitter Board at the RTP headquarters on Friday night]

Dr.Free-Ride was voted to be the best live-tweeter of the conference and has blogged some interesting thoughts about the experience (as well as a whole series of posts containing well organized collections of her tweets from each session – a good way to save the tweets forever). Check out also what Dave Munger wrote about it, as well as Chris Brodie’s links to (and evaluation of) various ways to find stored tweets (apparently almost 7000 of them, and still going strong three days after the meeting).

[Live Twitter screen]

Interestingly, our FriendFeed room was not used as much, considering that scientists and science bloggers tend to love it and use it a lot. I guess the purchase of FriendFeed by Facebook led many people to abandon the service although it is still, IMHO, the best venue for live online coverage of conferences. We’ll see what future brings – Google Wave?

Twitter itself was mentioned in many sessions as one of the tools people use to do, teach or communicate science. Considering that it was mentioned in only one session last year, this is a huge change. Now that Twitter is more of a way of talking than a company, something twitter-like is likely here to stay.

Diversity

We started and ended the conference with sessions on diversity in science online and offline, both of which got high marks from everyone who attended. Here, I only want to note that out of 269 people who registered at the door (or did not, but were reliably spotted by two or more witnesses, or locals who did not register but crashed the meeting and we know them well), 133 were men and 134 were women. This is a rare parity at tech, bloggy or science conferences. And it felt that way – comfortable for all. Also, we had 10 attendees younger than 18 and, if I am correct, two older than 70 – and every possible age in-between.

Overarching Themes

It is interesting how the conference evolved over the past four years. The first meeting was all about blogging – all sessions and conversations were about the way people use blogs to do, teach and communicate science. Most of the people gathered back in 2007 were bloggers. But things have changed over time…more about it in a second.

The 2008 meeting started expanding from blogs to other stuff scientists and those interested in science do online. If there was a theme, it was Activism – how to use blogs and other online tools to push back against enemies of reason and also how to influence the influentials (especially elected officials at various levels).

The 2009 meeting had one huge underlying theme – that of Power. But the other big theme then was Openness. We talked a lot about everything Open – from Open Notebook Science to Open Access Publishing. It was an appropriate year to have a lot of focus on it as this was the time when Open Access movement made huge strides, many scientists first became aware of Open Access and what it is, and many scientists were first made aware of the bankruptcy of the Impact Factor.

Since then, the emotions about it have calmed down a little bit – there is a sense that “good guys won” (the NIH open access mandate, the domino effect of Harvard’s OA mandate, huge growth in participation in OA week around the globe, enormous growth in the number of OA journals, etc.) and that we can now talk calmly about building the future system together. A number of people, including representatives of Nature and Elsevier, told me (or tweeted or mentioned in their feedback forms) that they really liked the session led by Pete Binfield on article-level metrics – instead of being combative (PLoS rulz!), it was a constructive discussion of strategies for moving forward all together to make the publishing world better adapted to the modern world.

As ScienceOnline is a modified Unconference – see this post for the detailed explanation of how we build the program – the content tends to reflect the composition of the meeting. First two years, the meeting was dominated by bloggers. Third by Open Access Evangelists. This one? Three groups, really: the ocean bloggers (not so much numerically as the fact that they are highly visible…..er, audible), the librarians, and, biggest cohort of all: science and medical journalists and writers.

As the Program grew on a wiki page with potential attendees suggesting sessions and volunteering to lead them, this year’s Program matched the profile of the group. Thus, there is no surprise that a couple of sessions, a couple of demos and an Ignite talk had marine themes. Likewise for sessions about librarianship and databases and reference managers.

But what was noticeable was lots and lots of sessions on the media and journalism. Which is perfectly fitting – 2009 was a year of great turmoil in the world of journalism, including science/medical journalism, with newspaper folding, journalists losing jobs and vigorous discussions about the future media ecosystems occuring throughout the year in various online and offline venues. This WAS the perfect year to have a focus on the media.

For the best coverage of the media ‘track’, see Ed Yong before and after, Christine Ottery before and after, David Dobbs, DeLene Beeland before and after and some more after, Andria Krewson, Sabine Vollmer, Ryan Somma, Janet Stemwedel and Eric Johnson.

What about my prediction that this year’s theme will be Trust? I think it was right. The word was used over and over again in many sessions, in various meanings, but mainly in the context of journalists and scientists (especially blogging scientists) eyeing each other with semi-suspicion and trying to (re)learn to trust each other. This world is changing, and the establishment of trust between these two formerly warring parties is a necessity. It was great to see the entire journalistic track start with Ed Yong opening his session with “Bloggers vs. Journalists is over – we will not talk about that, let’s move on”. And that sentiment remained with us throughout the meeting (perhaps meeting face-to-face engenders trust). During the provocative and excellent session on “Which scientists should journalists trust?” led by Connie St.Louis and Christine Ottery (who shared with me the 1st prize for Bounciest Happiest Energizer Bunny of #scio10), some outside onlookers on Twitter tried to inject the bloggers vs. journalists division into the conversation (something like “but bloggers can never be journalists”) and it was wonderful to see several people in the room politely (or is it civilly?) counter that (OK, OK, it was delicious to watch the wicked smack-downs by the likes of Ed Yong and Brian Switek).

But there are several other themes this year besides Trust, Bloggers vs. Journalists is over, and Importance of Meatspace and they are all related to each other in a way. One of them we shall perhaps call Integration.

Blog is software. If you search my blog for that phrase (or similar) you will find several instances of it. I was happy to see that phrase quoted on Twitter in another session and also happy to see Carl Zimmer repeat it at the beginning of his session. Blog is a tool, a medium. Like every other medium, it affects the form and format and the message. But it is not in itself a different means of communication. Corporate blogs and science blogs and political action blogs and personal blogs all have very different tones. It doesn’t matter.

One reason this meeting did not feel like a bloggers’ conference, unlike the previous ones, is that most people in attendance have by now gone beyond the idea of ‘being a blogger’, whatever that means. Whatever one does – scientific research, or science publishing, or science teaching, or science journalism, or freelance writing, etc, these days one needs to use a whole plethora of tools, only one of which is a blogging software. To succeed in this business, one cannot be a single-medium person any more. One has to use both the traditional channels of communication – books, scientific journals, popular science magazines, newspapers, photography, art, radio, television, movies – and the new communications technologies – websites, blogs, wikis, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, photoshop, art Tablets, podcasts, videos, etc. and combine most or all of them in one’s work.

Which explains why there was so much energy in the dialogue between people whose background is in Old Media and those who first entered the world of communication in the New Media, usually as bloggers. The two groups were eager to learn from each other how to best use each other’s tools. This may also explain why there was so much interest in the sessions about the book business – scientists who entered communication by becoming bloggers are now looking to expand into some of the more traditional realms because the non-techie segments of the population still use (and trust more!) the traditional channels. The Web-savvy scientists eager to improve the way science is reported, explained and presented in the media, in order to make the society more scientific, are intent on penetrating the traditional media – from books to newspapers to radio to Hollywood – in order to improve it from within by bringing their expertise into it.

Another big difference between previous three meetings and this one, in my opinion, is a switch from pure communication to Engagement. What do I mean by that? Everything we discussed in the previous years was geared toward a goal of making the information available and making sure people get it – that is a one-to-many approach: we are the experts, you are the non-experts, listen to us! This year, everyone was exploring the ways to get people engaged in some action. We had several sessions and demos covering a whole range of Citizen Science projects, in which communication tools were not just a way for scientists to talk to an audience, but for the public to get engaged in science – to do science. The scientists and journalists were exploring ways to engage each other more deeply (the Talking Trash session was a great example of this), Anil Dash was trying to figure out how to get people engaged in giving expertise to the government and affect policy, Nate Silver and Arikia Millikan were interested in scientifically studying how to best engage with people online, etc.

Most clear example of this shift between the past years and this one was the session by Miss Baker and her students. Last year she was teaching in a high school in Baltimore and her eight students from there came to the conference to tell us how they use online tools. That is, how they find, read and evaluate the scientific information we put out there – a more-or-less passive reading process. This year, students from her new school in Staten Island did something completely different: they showed us how they do stuff online, how they study the Web, how they design educational materials, make videos, run blogs, design computer games, and what criteria they find important in estimating the potential success of their projects with their peers. I don’t think these kids are any different from the kids we saw last year, or that they grew up in much different environments. I think it is just the case that the world of the Web has changed in the past year in a way that crossed over a threshold from expert=>non-expert communication (with potential for feedback in comments, sure) to a ‘we can all help each other become experts’ way of thinking and doing things, where experts are there more in an advisory role than as lecturers.

What will be the theme next year? Who knows, too early to tell. But it will be affected by the composition of the registrants, so start thinking now and recruiting your friends and colleagues now.

The Unconference

Our conference is growing (roughly 130, 170, 210 and 270 people attended them in the past four years respectively). We like it that way. We like to bring in fresh blood, not just have a reunion each year. But this also means that many of the n00bs at the meeting have never experienced an Unconference before. Some instantly fall in love with the format. But others find its perceived lack of structure uncomfortable (and pick Keynote, workshops, Ignite and demos as their faves in the feedback form). When I hear a complaint that the ‘audience hijacked the session from the moderator’ I think to myself “Great – that session was in the true unconference spirit”.

It is the job of the audience to NOT let the person on stage drone on. This is why the people on the stage are called moderators, not speakers. Most of our audience grokked this fast, and of course many have already been to unconferences before, either ours, or Scifoo, or various other Bar Camps etc. This year’s sessions, at least those I saw myself, were all highly participatory. And we want them that way.

The trick is how to get new people to understand the concept beforehand and embrace it. How to make sure that all the moderators are up to speed with the concept and able to function as moderators in it? What can be done online in advance to help that transition? How can the conference begin so everyone ‘gets it’ fast? Suggestions are welcome.

The fact that the conference is growing so fast means there are now many people who have attended it at least once and, perhaps with this experience under their belts, can moderate sessions next year. We hope that over the years the unconference format becomes so ubiquitous at conferences of all kinds that nobody will be surprised by it any more.

Plans for the Future

Yes, we have started planning already

The first big question is growth. There were 267 people here this year. There were 168 on the waitlist (though some of these managed to get in, but most did not). There is a huge interest in attending future meetings. What do we do? How big can the conference get before it loses its fun and intimate atmosphere? If we allow it to grow, where do we do it? We love Sigma Xi – it is so….scientific! Would a new venue that can hold more people be as nice?

As I said at the Friday event, before Michael Specter’s talk, we are not moving the conference to another town. There are good reasons we want to have this meeting permanently in the Triangle area: the incredible scientific community and an incredible online community, plus infrastructure and….well, I don’t want to move

People who want to organize a ‘franchise’ elsewhere should be free to do so – just contact us if you want to tap into our experience and expertise in organizing such an event. The ScienceOnline London version of the event is already going strong, planning for the third meeting this June. In 2011, there will be ScienceOnline Belgrade in Serbia. Anyone else who wants to organize it somewhere else, let us know.

Timing? We traditionally do this during the MLK, Jr weekend mainly because it is the time when the smallest number of other (scientific, skeptical, techie, etc.) meetings are taking place in any given year. But we will re-evaluate this – moving the conference to a later date, or to workdays instead of weekend, are ideas on the table for us to think about.

Thanks to everyone who has already filled the feedback form – we will read and re-read and analyze these carefully. We do it every year and use your feedback to make the next event even better. Stay in touch.

John Mckay and I (the resident primate at ScienceBlogs) will be facilitating a discussion on the history of open access and how vital it’s been for scientific innovation on Saturday from 3:15 – 4:20 as part of Section C: An Open History of Science. We’ll present some of the historical barriers that have stood in the way of what Robert K. Merton called “the ethos of science” and foster discussion on how we can remove those barriers today. For related links on how the history of science can inform today’s practice see The Scientific Revolution is Open, The Grassroots of Scientific Revolution, and the four part series on Deconstructing Social Darwinism at The Primate Diaries.

We may be enjoying the pinnacle of the modern scientific revolution here in the West, but the developing world needs these tools most of all. Considering that the greatest issues involving climate, population, pollution and conservation exist in the Global South the dearth of access to subscription journals is of paramount importance. The Directory of Open Access Journals now has more than 4,500 entries and the list is growing every day. This is the future of scientific communication and we’re building that future right now.

Many of the citizen science projects that I’ve been reading about have a common structure. There’s a University lab at the top, outreach educators in the middle, and a group of citizens out in the field collecting data.

After the data are collected, they end up in a database somewhere and the University researchers analyze them and write papers. At least that’s my impression so far.

It seems to me, that with all kinds of databases out there, on-line, there should be plenty of opportunity for both citizens and student groups to participate in analyzing the data.

But do they?

Cross posted at Discovering Biology in a Digital World
#scio10

In the world of genomics, high throughput DNA sequencing, and structural biology, data generation far exceeds the ability for analysis.

To paraphrase an editorial in Nature Biotechnology: more data will be collected this year, than in the entire past decade.

And, people (well, writers anyway) were already saying we were deluged by data.

Is there a place for citizen scientists to help analyze a bit of it?

I think so. But I haven’t been able to find very many.

So far, the most promising projects are pretty much limited to University researchers and students. That’s not bad, but the opportunities for involvement are pretty restricted. For example, JGI has this wonderful project where classes adopt bacterial genomes and help with annotation. I think that’s great and this effort has even been helpful in generating at least one wonderful paper.

But the Adopt a Genome program isn’t open access.

Consequently, there are about sixty genomes available and less than a third have been adopted.

I think this project would be even more successful with community participation. Even the number of student groups could be increased by loosening the reins a bit. Right now, student groups are vetted pretty carefully before they can adopt. In order for a class to work on a genome, the instructor has to attend a workshop that’s only offered once a year at the JGI. This is probably a great experience for the instructors who can attend, but many instructors can’t take the time or don’t have the funds to travel, and the number of slots is limited. True, annotation isn’t trivial, but if we can teach computers to do it, it seems like the instructions to humans could be made available online.

If an instructor or interested citizens (like the DIY bio group) could attend the workshop in a virtual sense through on-line tutorials or videos and “get certified” as annotators, perhaps all the genomes could get adopted or actively annotated.

C’mon JGI, why not open the door and use on-line education tools to increase the number of participants and get more citizen and student involvement?

I did a quick list in my post a while back, but I revisited the attendee list after it closed and noticed a couple of people that weren’t in the first list.

As I said in the earlier post, there’s been a good tradition of librarians and library people attending Science Online and this year looks to be no exception. So, here’s the updated list. Of course, it’s only the people whose names I recognize or who I was able to figure out had a library connection so I may be missing a couple. If I’ve missed you, let me know and I’ll add you.

• Stephanie Willen Brown

• John Dupuis
• Garrett Eastman
• Michael Habib
• Sarah Jeong
• Molly Keener
• Hope Leman
• Gary Pattillo
• Christina Pikas
• Dorothea Salo
• Kevin Smith
• Bonnie Swoger
• KT Vaughn
• Josh Wilson

I’m lucky enough to have met a good number of the above librarians and I’m really looking forward to meeting Stephanie and Dorothea who I’ve know online for a while but haven’t had a chance to mean in person yet.

There are also a few library-themed sessions at the conference. It’s worth following the links to the wiki description pages as those have a lot more information on what the session will be about and when kinds of questions/issues will be discussed:

Repositories for Fun and Profit – Dorothea Salo (Friday workshop)

Description: Why are my librarians bothering me with all this repository nonsense? What’s a repository, and how is it different from a website? What can a repository do for me? Why should I bother with them? Does anybody use them? What’s all this about metadata, anyway? Find out from a real live repository librarian!

Online Reference Managers – John Dupuis and Christina Pikas moderating, with Kevin Emamy, Jason Hoyt, Trevor Owens and Michael Habib (Scopus) in the ‘hot seats’.

Description: Reference managers, sometimes called citation managers or bibliography managers, help you keep, organize, and re-use citation information. A few years ago, the options were limited to expensive proprietary desktop clients or BibTeX for people writing in LaTeX. Now we’ve got lots of choices, many that are online, support collaboration and information sharing, and that work with the authoring tools you use to write papers. In this session we’ll hear from representatives of some of these tools and we’ll talk about the features that make them useful. Together we will discuss some tips and tricks, best practices and maybe even get into upcoming features, wish lists and the future of citation management software.

Scientists! What can your librarian do for you? – Stephanie Willen Brown and Dorothea Salo

Description: Find free, scholarly, science stuff on the Internet, via your public or state library, or on the “free Web.” Learn tips & tricks for getting full-text science research at all levels, through resources like DOAJ and NC Live (for those with a North Carolina library card; other states often offer free resources to library card holders). Find out about some options for storing science material at your academic institution’s Institutional Repository. We will also talk about the broader access to material stored in institutional repositories and elsewhere on the Web.

Demo: Scangrants by Hope Leman

Description: ScanGrants is a free, subscribable (via email or RSS) online listing of grant opportunities, prizes and scholarships in the health and life sciences and community service fields.

I can’t wait to get to the conference. I’ll be arriving fairly late on Friday night, mostly because my son is coming with me and it just wasn’t convenient for us to leave any earlier. I’ll be posting summaries and impressions here at cross-posting at the ScienceOnline blog.

(Cross-posted from Confessions of a Science Librarian.)

You can check out the app in iTunes here.

Features include a schedule quick-reference, information about the conference as a whole, and a brief nod to the participating sponsors.

The app is named ‘SciOnline10′ due to the (visible) naming restrictions on the device. Searching for Science, Online, or ScienceOnline2010 (or the app name, SciOnline10) will find it on the App Store if the link doesn’t work for you.

The most recent post, just put up, is this one:

Who Do You Trust When It Comes to Your Precious Bodily Fluids?

For many topics of interest to the average person, there seem to be two utterly different and diametrically opposed worlds of information. These worlds are so different that one might be called “Normal World” and the other might be called “Bizarro World.”…

Earlier, these items were also posted:

Are you a real skeptic? I doubt it.

Credulity, Skepticism and Cynicism

Empowering the individual does not equal ensmartening the individual

Trust and Critical Thinking in Science Reporting: A Case Study

Cross-posted at Discovering Biology in a Digital World.

In an earlier post, I started a list of citizen science projects that allow students to make a contribution. Many commentors are graciously adding to that list and I thank you all! I’m glad to learn there are so many interesting projects and ways for people to get involved. Science is so empowering!

My question today concerns things like outcomes and deliverables. We’d like to assume that good things are coming from citizen science because people are involved, but I don’t know if that’s really true and being a scientist, I want to avoid over-doing the assumptions.

Does the research from citizen science ever get published?

Last Wednesday, at the University of Washington, I learned about one such study. If you know of others, I’d love to see citations in the comments.

One of my fantasies when I was a full-time college instructor was to figure out a good project where my students and I could collaborate and we could collect publishable data.

This sounds easy, and there are plenty of projects out there now where students can do this, but when I was teaching, I had a hard time finding one that combined our learning goals with a chance to do real science. I did publish one paper (1) from our sequencing project, but I would have liked to do more.

One of the papers that I always liked was a paper that combined ecology and microbiology. In this study, the authors enlisted girl scouts to go out in the woods and drop acorns in certain areas so they could learn more about Lyme disease (2). I know this was a serious study, but I can’t imagining an army of little Red Riding Hood girls, skipping through the woods with GPS devices, dropping acorns from their baskets.

Since then, I’ve been learning more about citizen science, sometimes combined with student projects, and it’s made me wonder how often these efforts result in peer-reviewed publications.

Do these studies get used for anything beyond education and entertainment?

I haven’t been able to find digital biology projects that involve citizen science, but last week, at the UW COSEE workshop, I attended a talk where Dr. Nathalie Hamel talked about her work, the contribution from citizen scientists, and a resulting publication.

As a graduate student, Dr. Hamel studied the question of whether gill nets have an impact on marine birds. Marine birds that dive, like the Common Murre, can be confused by nets and drown. Until her study however, the magnitude of the effect of gill nets on bird drownings had not been systematically measured.

Citizen science data became a valuable part of her study because they allowed her to survey a wider area and measure the number of birds that are normally found dead on the beach, in the absence of a nearby fishery. The data provided information about the kinds of birds that were normally found on the beach and the number of birds found at different times of year.

In Washington, the citizen science group that really made an impact was the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST). COASST is a network of volunteers who monitor the Washington beaches. When COASST volunteers find dead birds on the beach, they photograph them, identify them, take measurements, tag them and enter the data in a web interface to an on-line database. For this project, entries were verified by experts using foot type, photographs, and the measurements (3).

One of the greatest concerns that scientists have about citizen science efforts is data quality. In this study, COASST data were validated through numerous means. Birds were tagged to prevent volunteers from counting them more than once. Photographs and measurements were taken and used by UW researchers to recheck citizen data. The web site was also designed to include some error checking tools, increasing the likelihood of capturing higher quality data.

Through the verification process, the researchers at UW were able to measure the quality of citizen science data. Quoting from the paper (3):

Across the program, volunteers were able to identify carcasses correctly to the level of species and family 85% and 92% of the time respectively (present study).

Fig. 2. Species of dead birds identified by COASST, 1999-2008, data regraphed from COASST.

With the background data in hand, the researchers were able to compare the number of dead birds per kilometer and determine if the numbers were different near fisheries.

In case you’re wondering, the story didn’t stop with research paper. The study found that gill net fisheries did have an impact on drowning events and murres were especially vulnerable. Even better, Dr. Hamel mentioned in her talk that these data are being used by fisheries to inform decisions.

References:
1. Sandra Porter and Todd Smith (2000). Bioinformatics in the Biotechnology Classroom Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, 24, 314-318

2. Jones, C. (1998). Chain Reactions Linking Acorns to Gypsy Moth Outbreaks and Lyme Disease Risk Science, 279 (5353), 1023-1026 DOI: 10.1126/science.279.5353.1023

3. Nathalie J. Hamel, Alan E. Burger, Kristin Charleton, Peter Davidson, & Sandi Lee, Douglas F. Bertram and Julia K. Parrish (2009). Bycatch and Beached Birds: Assessing Mortality Impacts in Coastal Net Fisheries Using Marine Bird Strandings Marine Ornithology, 37, 41-60(pdf)

Erin Johnson, Janet Stemwedel, Christina Pikas, Rebecca Skloot, Dorothea Salo, Anne Jefferson, Suzanne Franks, SciCurious, Sandra Porter, Dr.Isis, Katie Thompson, Greta Munger, Dave Munger, Abel PharmBoy, Blake Stacey, Pal MD, Ed Yong, John Dupuis, Brian Switek, Chris Rowan, James Hrynyshyn, David Dobbs, Eric Michael Johnson, Greg Laden, PZ Myers and me.

So, if you are a fan or a groupie of one of us or all of us, and are in the Triangle area of NC this weekend, and would like to come by and say Hi, either contact your favourite blogger directly, or come to one of the evening events that are open to non-registered public.