ScienceOnline'10 - mark your calendars

On Wednesday night, Anton Zuiker and I met over dinner at Town Hall Grill (and an amazing vocalist of local "Caribou Barbie Unboxed" band) and made some plans.

We confirmed the date - ScienceOnline'10 will be on 15-17th January 2010 in Triangle, NC.

We will have science and food related tours on Friday, ending with something special in the evening, followed by regular programming on Saturday (whole day) and Sunday (until noon). So, mark your calendars.

I'll post more information as it becomes available, but briefly: we are having it, economic crisis or not. Sigma Xi is the likely venue (but not 100% sure yet - it's just so hard to find a place as nice that could accommodate perhaps 50 extra people).

We'll have a small registration fee (as sponsors are unlikely to shower us with riches in this economic situation), so we can be sure to have enough funds to run the conference, even if we have to cut down somewhat on the luxuries we used to shower you all with. Registration fee also ensures that people who register are committed to show up and are not just holding a place, "just in case", while 50 others are waiting on the waiting list.

Of course, if your company is doing fine financially and you are willing to become a sponsor, then there will be no need to cut back on anything. Sponsor a meal, or an event, or travel costs for some poor students, or technical support (power, wifi, recording, livestreaming), though every organizer also loves to have some discretionary funds that can be used for whatever need arises in the last moment.

We'll expand our organizing committee (there is a large pool of people interested) at a party/cookout in late July or early August, when we'll make a division of labor. More information about that later. We are also going to ask the community for ideas soon (not yet about sessions, but about ways to make the conference work better, go smoothly, become more attractive, etc.) using a Woofoo form or a wiki.

Does anyone want to design the logo and banner for the conference? The old one says "'09" and we need one that doesn't.

So stay tuned - there will be regular updates here, on our Twitter/FriendFeed/Facebook streams, and on the scienceblogging.com page.