SCi-Foo lives on, Second Life Sessions
I didn't make it to Sci-Foo, but I eagerly lurked, and pored over the veritable explosion of blog postings that erupted onto the web, essentially from the moment that the meeting began. When Jean-Claude Bradley announced on Nature Network the idea of follow on sessions in Second Life I was pretty excited. So on Monday afternoon I brushed off my Avatar and put on the de rigeur Second Nature freebee T-Shirt.
This was my first time taking part in a meeting in Second Life, and I struggled a little with the slide presentation. I believe that there was a plan to have the meeting use the voice aspect of second life, but some people didn't have head phones and others that had, were unable to shout out past the firewall that keeps up all safe. The result was that if you could type fast you were able to get more information across (a good motivation to take pick up with the typing lesson tutor app that has sat unused for about two years on my computer). My colleague Hilary Spencer was a little late for her presentation. She told me later that the reason was that when she logged into second life she discovered that her Avatar was wearing a corset and lace-up jeans, and needed to make a quick change before a professional meeting, mind you, JC was a furry cat, so it is clear that this is one area where content is far more important than appearance.
It was very nice to get the feeling that people were coming together from many different places, and Bertalan Meskó has a very nice report on the meeting. One of the advantages of being type only is that Jean-Claude has been able to post a full transcript of the session on his blog.
Mostly the meeting revolved around a Q&A session about a number of tools for scientists. There was a short moment at the beginning of the meeting where it looked like there might be a discussion on the definitions of Open Science, and this has seeded into a number of other discussions.
Richard Ackerman makes some interesting points in his post open science and the impact factory where he proposes that people interested in coming to a definition should use the nodal point wiki.
These thoughts are mirrored by Bill Hooker here.
At the end there was a quick vote on what the next session should be about and we settled on
Medicine and Web2.0 Aug 27 at 16:00 GMT with a continuation of Definitions for Open Science Sept 4 16:00 GMT.
Comments
Ian,
I'm glad you were able to make it and thanks for the report on our first SciFoo Lives On session!
Indeed I was hoping to use voice but I think it turned out better with chat. As I am gaining more experience with it, I think voice is good for very small groups (2-4) of people who already know each other and can recognize who is speaking. Also if you miss something with chat you can just scroll back with the history button.
So the next sessions will be chat, although if we happen to meet each other any other time I would be happy to use the voice feature.
If slow typing is a problem for some, it might help to slow things down at a given point. If I am moderating, you can just shoot me an IM requesting that we spend 5 minutes on a subtopic that you would like to lead. My goal in moderating was to make sure that everyone with a poster had a chance to present and that we end within an hour.
(By the way, I hope you weren't too taken aback with my feline form :)
Posted by: Jean-Claude Bradley | August 23, 2007 08:36 AM