ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

Continuing with the series (I get more and more feedback that people love this) introducing, a few at a time, the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.

Anil Dash is a pioneer blogger (and of course twitterer) and one of the founders of Six Apart, the company that built blogging platforms including MoveableType (which is used by Scienceblogs.com) and Typepad.

Just yesterday, he made an official announcement that he will be leading Expert Labs (also on Twitter) which is a new project (largely run/funded by AAAS) to facilitate feedback by the experts (including scientists, of course) to the Obama Administration and other government officials. Read the press release, the early media coverage (this one is much better) , an interview with Anil (pdf) and a video. Interestingly, Anil got this job due to writing a blog post stating that the executive branch of the federal government of the United States was the "Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009".

At ScienceOnline2010, Anil will run the session Government 2.0 the main purpose of which is for him to get feedback from the leaders of the science and Web community on how to make Expert Labs work the best it possibly can.

Lindsey Hoshaw is a freelance journalist and a recent journalism graduate from Stanford University. She has stirred quite a lot of passion in the world of journalism recently by being one of the first and probably best known products of 'crowdsourced journalism' - she made a pitch at Spot.us and it was successful - she collected sufficient funds (and the Facebook fan page helped there as well) to go on a reporting trip on a research ship to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. She reported from the voyage on her blog and via Twitter (also her personal account). I blogged about this before the trip started.

A short summary article by Lindsey was then published in the New York Times (which, while making no promises, was interested in the story from the start). That article (and especially in comparison to her blogging) was greeted by quite a lot of commentary, some by media watchers and journalists, some by scientists. See the reactions, for example, by Megan Garber, Miriam Goldstein, John Zhu, Martin Robbins, Mathew Ingram and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and Sheril again - read the comment thread).

The voyage, and the reporting from it (both on traditional and modern media platforms), brought into light the differences between the goals, needs, methods and ethics of journalists and those of scientists. What those differences are, and how they can be surmounted so scientists and journalists can work together and each do a better job, will be the topic of the session that Lindsay will be co-moderating - Talking Trash - which promises to be quite exciting!

Ben MacNeill is a designer here in Chapel Hill. I first met Ben at the 2005 BloggerCon at UNC. When his daughter Trixie was born he started a blog, Trixie Update, on which he recorded and graphed everything he could think of about his daughter's daily patterns: when she slept, ate, had a diaper change, etc. I commented on this, from a perspective of a chronobiologist, in an old blog post about the development and consolidation of circadian rhythms and sleep patterns in human infants. Trixie is far too old to have diapers changed any more, but the setup continues. Ben has developed the software further and is now offering it as an iPhone (or Web) application - the Trixie Tracker which you can use, if you are a new parent, to track everything you want about your baby (and perhaps detect early if something suddenly changes and perhaps requires medical attention). Ben is also on Twitter.

At the conference, Ben will do a demo of Data-driven parenting - Trixie Tracker and co-moderate the session on Citizen Science.

Elia Ben-Ari is a freelance science writer and editor who has published in many good venues over the years. She is active on Twitter. Her latest article (which, understandably, garnered quite a lot of interest online) is Twitter: What's All the Chirping About?

Wayne Sutton is a social media maven. He is a partner of social media marketing agency OurHashtag, the co-host of a social media podcast at TalkSocialNews.com, the host of the online video show WayneSutton.TV, and a veteran blogger. He is on every social networking site imaginable, but here let's just link to his Twitter account. At ScienceOnline2010, Wayne will do an Ignite talk "Why Triangle is Better than Silicon Valley".

Cara Rousseau is the Director for Partnership Initiatives at the Research Triangle Foundation (read more about it in yesterday's post), one of our biggest sponsors and hosts this year. She tweets, both as herself and for RTP and has just started the official RTP blog. At the conference, Cara will do a demo of the Research Triangle Park - how online and offline work together.