What do Eric Lander, Frank Wilczek, James Randi and Martha Stewart have in common? Answer: they were all attendees at the second Science Foo Camp from 3 to 5 August, co-organized by Nature Publishing Group, O’Reilly Media and Google, and hosted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

The ‘Foo Camp’ format has been pioneered by O’Reilly, a publisher of computing books and organizer of technology conferences, as an antidote to the often overly restrictive nature of formal conferences, where most of the best conversations seem to happen in hallways and during coffee breaks rather than at the main sessions. Foo is self-organizing, unpredictable and rather anarchic – but also quite wonderful.

For fuller accounts, see Henry Gee’s End of the Pier Show blog on Nature Network, this Edge essay by George Dyson and Timo Hannay’s account on Nascent. There is lots of other blog coverage which can be accessed from this summary page .