I will make a section on the SciBarCamp wiki to put these links as well, but here are a few reports on various SciBarCamp blogs.
- Philip Johnson of Biocurious writes about the event in general, and the discussion on digital lab notebooks that was going on on Saturday morning.
- Melanie Swan ponders the connection between art and science and suggests an “ArtBarCamp”. Sounds great, do it!
- Sabine Hossenfelder of Backreaction wrote about the event and has some comments about the scheduling system.
- Robert J. Sawyer has some general comments about the event and the schedule, but different comments than Sabine had, which just goes to show how hard it is to please everyone. He also mentions how his colleague SF writer Peter Watts was holding up very well to scientific comments, which sheds new light on this post in which Peter Watts writes about what it was like to be surrounded by people “smarter than him”
The schedule:
On Sunday we had a session to evaluate SciBarCamp, and make some plans for the future. We started talking, and one of the first things that came up was: “We should start at 10 AM instead of 9 AM, and go later, so people can go straight to dinner”. Duly noted. Then the latecomers started dripping in and offered their suggestions: “Hey, I have an idea, why don’t we start at 10 instead of 9!”. Yes, we already had that. More latecomers: “Next time you might want to consider starting a bit later…”
On Saturday there were quite a lot of people at 9 AM, but on Sunday it was a bit harder. There were roadblocks for the St Patrick’s day parade in the area where we were and the subways don’t start running until 9 on Sundays, so that might have played a role, but in general it just seems that getting up early multiple days in a row is hard, and people would rather end later and have dinner together than start early.
We had multiple rooms in the afternoon so people could plan parallel sessions and discuss more specific topics in small groups. On Saturday the different rooms seemed to be in different time zones, but on Sunday it worked more smoothly. We had to pay for the rooms by the hour, which answers Robert Sawyer’s question of why we didn’t use them in the morning. We had some sponsors to cover room rental and lunch costs, but in the end we were still $600 short (the cost of lunch) and had to ask people to contribute to Sunday’s lunch, which didn’t seem to be a problem. (Awkward to ask, though, but really, there IS no such thing as a free lunch.)Sabine commented on the chaos of the schedule being edited on the go. I don’t really know how that could have been done differently (maybe not write it on paper but on a white board so things look cleaner after editing). We still want to have the flexibility of spontaneous session merging and switching rooms and time slots and not set the schedule
Sabine commented on the chaos of the schedule being edited on the go. I don’t really know how that could have been done differently (maybe not write it on paper but on a white board so things look cleaner after editing). We still want to have the flexibility of spontaneous session merging and switching rooms and time slots and not set the schedule in advance.
Personally, my only problem with the schedule was that there were multiple cool things going on at the same time, and I tried to attend more than one, but that didn’t work out at all. I caught half of the poetry/language panel on Saturday and then went to the futurist panel, but they were just having an interactive session where different groups were discussing different possible futures, so it was impossible to follow without having caught the beginning.
Expect more blog posts later this week/month on the following:
-Did people make new connections? (Spoiler alert: yes, they did!)
-Some links to things that I found out about at SciBarCamp.
-By popular request*, I’ll write up something about my entire session on Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science, including the whole process, picture of the poster, and the outcome (we didn’t make it to 10, but we agreed on 3 points.)
-More people’s feedback
-Inspiration and communities (why we need it in sci/art/tech, and how SciBarCamp played a role in this.)
(*Three people asked.)
