Wow. I just got back from Sci Foo camp, a meeting of over three hundred people from all areas of science held at the infamous Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Whereas most science conferences tend to be focused around a particular topic, this was an unconference (inspired by similar events held in the technology industry), organised by Google, Nature and O'Reilly Media. There was no theme, no schedule, and no rules particularly except that we were encouraged to attend sessions that we knew nothing about, and talk to people we didn't know.
As well as scientists from all areas there were lawyers, journalists, bloggers, filmmakers and philosophers. History of science was also well represented, with attendees including Will Noel of the Archimedes Palimpsest project, Tilly Blyth, curator of computing at the Science Museum, Nigel Warburton, creator of the excellent Philosophy Bites podcast and Bonnie DeVarco, who for many years was chief archivist for the Buckminster Fuller archive, but is now involved in exploring visualisation technologies. There were also plenty of demos, including a lego model of the Antikythera mechanism made by Andrew Carol, which I'm hoping to write about in a future post.
The result was a fascinating weekend - I ended up in discussions about everything from how virtual reality technologies will affect children's brains, to the end of gravity as we know it. I blogged the event for New Scientist, so rather than repeat myself, here are links to all my posts from the meeting:
Lego to loo seats: an unconference at Google HQ
Are you ready for life in world 3?
Evolution of music and a dancing cockatoo
Rewriting gravity over a tuna roll
And here are some other attendees' posts that I enjoyed:
Letter from SciFoo: The joys and sorrows of the unconference (Carl Zimmer)
Correspondent's diary: Around the campfire (The Economist)
Sci Foo 2010 Un-conference at Googleplex (Nigel Warburton)
Even more links are collected here.