I’ve been rather offline these last few days while taking some time off at home in Canada, but I’m back now. I’m in California, attending Sci Foo, the Nature, Google and O’Reilly (a technology publishing company)-hosted 2-day conference at the Google headquarters.

It’s unlike any conference you’ll attend: Powerpoints are not encouraged, there was no agenda until we all arrived last night, and it drew an amazing mix of people: from Nobel laureates like Andrew Fire and Frank Wilczek to leading scientists like Eric Lander, Lee Smolin and George Church. Also in the pack are scientists from various fields (astrophysicists, cell biologists, chemists, bioinformaticists, etc etc), science fiction writers, futurists, artists, librarians, journalists, bloggers, museum folks, members of the digerati…even Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and Martha Stewart are in attendance.

In the intro session last night, everyone—yes, all 200+ of us—had to introduce themselves: name, affiliation and 3 tags that described themselves. My jet lagged brain had trouble keeping track of them all, but I was pretty blown away and humbled by the variety and breadth of activities and interests and accomplishments. Still there were some common themes: open access, open science, digital publishing and communities, the intersection of science, technology and the web.

The agenda was built last night wiki-style: giant boards twice my height were presented to us, along with magic markers. On the boards were blocks of time where any of us could write in a session that we wanted to host. Talk about freeform conferencing. I had to squeeze my way through the crowds to write on the board. I’m scheduled, along with my colleague Natalie DeWitt at Nature Reports Stem Cells to lead a talk about how to get scientists to care about web 2.0.

more soon.