Last year, when I (@praeburn) came home from ScienceOnline2011 (#scio11), I told my wife, Elizabeth (@devitaraeburn) that it was the most exciting meeting I thought I’d ever attended. “The energy was incredible,” I told her. “I got so many ideas. And I met all kinds of people whom I knew only from Twitter.” I mentioned some and pointed her to their blogs. “You have to follow these people!” I said.
Many of them, I told her, were so excited about their writing that they were doing it for nothing other than the sheer joy of putting words to pixels. How they fed, clothed, and sheltered themselves was an obvious question, but few seemed to be starving, at least while the conference food was available; most were dressed, as far as I recall; and most seemed to have found a way to snag a room at the hotel. (I didn’t see anything like an Occupy ScienceOnline tent city outside the hotel.) The 250 slots at last year’s conference filled up in minutes, which put the demand for the conference far above any other science or medical meeting I could recall, and only a few notches below a Springsteen concert.
I wasn’t sure such an event could be recreated, but I just returned from ScienceOnline2012 (#scio12), and I can report that the alchemists who organize the meeting were able to recreate the same magic, turning conversation, discussion and debate into gold. And Elizabeth was there, which saved me from trying once again to explain exactly how cool the meeting was. Now, she knows.
Mainly what we did was talk about writing, about science, and about the pleasure we take in what we do. Scientist-bloggers and journalist-bloggers talked about their roles and what it meant to be one or the other, and what it will mean in the coming months and years.
The meeting lived and breathed on Twitter as much as it did in person. People meeting for the first time stole glances at name tags not to find names but to find Twitter handles. Among the most commonly overheard remarks among people saying hello were “It’s so nice to meet you in person,” and “I follow you!” At one point, during a session that Elizabeth conducted with Maryn McKenna (@marynmck) on writing for women’s magazines, I watched as tweets appeared about one per second, describing what was happening at that session and the four or five others going on concurrently. One could be everywhere and nowhere at once. Or, to paraphrase a joke from Brian Malow (@sciencecomedian), we could all, like Schroedinger’s cat, be simultaneously in a session–and not.
A few highlights: Believing myself to be fairly comfortable with Twitter, and even a little knowledgeable, I went to a session led by Adrian Ebsary (@AJEbsary) and Lou Woodley (@LouWoodley) about measuring and increasing one’s influence on Twitter. I was flabbergasted by how little I knew–and how much they knew–about using Twitter. I easily got enough ideas and homework to last me until next year’s meeting. At another session by David Dobbs (@David_Dobbs) and Deborah Blum (@deborahblum), I heard some fascinating ideas about how to structure a long piece of writing, and I resolved to think a lot more about the structure of the magazine piece I’m working on right now. Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) talked about the challenges and opportunities of publishing e-books, and, once again, I found myself dazzled by how much there was to learn.
Ed Yong (@edyong209), another leading figure in the #scio12 family, wrote, in a blog post immediately after the conference, that it was important that the conference drew the most passionate people (only those willing to scramble to get a spot), freed them up to do nothing but talk to one another, and created an atmosphere in which everyone was equal–Pulitzer prize winners rubbed elbows with recent grads.
He’s right on all three points. I’ll make another observation, which I’m stealing from Elizabeth, who looked around the room at one point and noted that the participants seemed to be infused with the warm and friendly spirit of cooperation. That’s not a common thing for writers, who can be a competitive lot.
That’s another part of the alchemy of the meeting’s organizers–Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ), Anton Zuiker (@mistersugar), and Karyn Traphagen (@ktraphagen), who logged countless volunteer hours to make the meeting happen, and have been doing so for six years now. Their vision created and sustains this world; the rest of us just live in it. They do not draw up a formal program. Instead, they create a wiki on which anyone can post ideas or suggest sessions, and then they shape and craft that wiki into a program as the year passes. The conference itself is organized not around lectures, but sessions in which moderators facilitate discussion–an unconference, as the alchemists call it.
If you’d like to know more about the meeting, you can find a mapping of #scio12 tweets here–17,438 of them from 133 people. There another collection here. You can find the #scio12 wiki of blog posts here. You can follow the stream–still bubbling with enthusiasm–by following #scio12 on Twitter. And you can watch next year’s meeting take place–before your very eyes–on the ScienceOnline2013 wiki, where members of the ScienceOnline family have already posted nearly two dozen suggested sessions for next year’s conference.
— Paul Raeburn
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