SciFoo: The Podcast
Just in case you haven't already ODed on SciFoo blog coverage — or perhaps you have but a touch of audio will come as welcome relief — the 16 August episode of the Nature Podcast has a great segment on the event narrated by my colleague, Adam Rutherford. Listen here. (If you're impatient then fast-forward to 21 minutes in, but don't miss the celebrity endorsement at 1:29.)
As usual, the rest of the show is well worth a listen too. And if you like what you hear, subscribe to the Nature Podcast RSS feed.
AND as an exclusive bonus feature for Nascent readers, here's the whole of Adam's interview with Tim O'Reilly. Lots here about what Foo Camp is, how it came about, and why we do it.
Kudos to Tim for being one of the few Americans to be able to pronounce my name. I'll correct him on only one point: the original concept for SciFoo came out of a discussion not between him and me, but between him and Linda Stone. I merely agreed with them that it was a great idea... then went without sleep for a couple of months while I emailed people to urge them to attend.
Comments
Apologies once again to Linda. I keep thinking that the conversation was with you because you'd planted the seed.
As you know, we'd been brainstorming for a while about something we could do together again after working together on our Bioinformatics conference in 2001.
So I'd run into you at Etech, and you'd raised the issue again. So it was burning a hole in my pocket so to speak.
I was talking with Linda a few minutes later, and the thread that you'd started with me bubbled to the surface in a "Eureka" moment, which I shared with Linda.
She jumped on the idea, and urged me to take it seriously -- and also had the brilliant idea to involve Google.
Thanks, Linda and Timo both, for what turned out to be a brilliant inspiration.
Posted by: Tim O'Reilly | August 15, 2007 03:22 PM
Thanks for the clarification, Tim, and for filling in some more of the back story.
Personally, I'm just happy that SciFoo exists, and very pleased indeed to be involved.
It's hard to believe that the idea is less than 18 months old (the original email you sent to me at ETech was dated 8 March 2006), and that a year ago, just before the first SciFoo, we were still wondering whether the whole concept would work at all. I'm so glad it did. :)
Posted by: Timo Hannay | August 15, 2007 05:34 PM