SCIFOO

I've just gotten back from SciFoo, an amazing conference put on by O'Reilly Media in cooperation with Nature and hosted at Google. It's a fascinating mixture of the who's who - picture Ed Felten talking to Martin Rees and Daniel Kahneman - with mere mortals who have done something particularly interesting of late such as Pete Warden, who was doing some interesting analyses of Facebook data until he got sued and James Hughes, a grad student who has been using algorithms to identify fake Breugels. Special bonus for me: several cool people interested in science careers, including Gabrielle Lyon, Derek Lowe, and Meredith Carpenter.

SciFoo is a spinoff of Foo Camp (Foo = Friends of O'Reilly), an annual, invite-only conference for the digerati. While I haven't managed to get an invite to Foo Camp, I've done the next best thing: I've attended Bar Camp, a series of Foo Camp alternatives organized by people who, like me, didn't get an invite to Foo Camp but wanted to do something similar.

The Foo/Bar camps are "un-conferences" in that the sessions are organized by the participants on the spot. Basically the organizers get together a space + food, seed the invite list with interesting people, and get the word out. The rest takes care of itself. People put together sessions on things that they are passionate about, and lots of cross-fertilization of ideas takes place.

I think SciFoo needs a corresponding Bar Camp - call it SciBar. Organizing such a thing would be a lot of fun and would be a great way for an aspiring postdoc or grad student to build an amazing network. Plus it just might get you to SciFoo...