Notes/personal observations from my year of science conferences (covering SciBarCamp, SciFoo, Science Commons and Citizen Science Alliance).

In July I attended SciBarCamp and SciFoo. These were both amazing events, each with their own approach and attendee diversity. While SciBarCamp had diversity in the types of science each attendee worked in, in general the people who chose to be there were fairly tech-savvy and more on the communications/outreach side of science than the scientist side. At SciFoo it was about the opposite, people coming from very diverse areas of science with varying roles/experiences in it, but a lot less tech-savvy.

BarCamps and FooCamps revolve around the user-generated goal of having everyone who attends actively contribute to the conference. I had a rough idea for a topic I wanted to converse with people about in hopes of gaining more first-person insight around it. After brainstorming with my counterpart Natalie (pictured above with me in our lab coats at Institute For The Future), we ended up on the title, “Open Collaboration Between Scientists, Communities, and the Unknown“. I gave the talk at both conferences, treating it as a conversation in progress. The two sessions went very differently. At SciBarCamp, I gave the talk with Natalie and by the end of it, people in the room were eager with voicing their thoughts on how to solve open collaboration problems and offering advice to other people who voiced concerns. At SciFoo, I led the talk and had a few other attendees demonstrate their endeavors in open collaboration. Though the talk is inherently conversational (having each attendee speak up at least once), it was mostly crickets. I have an inkling as to why this was.

In my observations, the more tech-savvy crowds were more vocal, but less diverse. At SciFoo, while it was incredibly inspiring to be around people you might otherwise never in your life get a chance to meet, the diversity seemed to create conversational barriers, which made BarCamp-style interactive talks more difficult some of the time. It felt as if the extreme differences between people made them less eager to offer advice/solutions to one another. Some of this could also be accounted for by the majority of the attendees not being familiar with the user-generated conference format and thus more used to just sitting back and listening to a talk.

The coolest thing off the top of my head that I learned about at SciFoo was a guy talking about his geo-engineering solution for climate change. Essentially using microbubble generators attached to boats that cause water to temporarily appear white in the ocean. He had worked out all the logistics for it and calculated that enough sunlight would be reflected off the otherwise dark-blue-light-absorbing ocean to make a big change. I think he is working out making this a reality (or at least I hope he is!). I’m frustrated each time I see an article on geo-engineering being unrealistic (always citing the “mirrors in space” idea to generate “yeah, right” reactions from readers).

Either way, I had a great time at SciBarCamp and I was completely honored to be one of the few invited to SciFoo (seriously, an event with world renowned scientists from every subject around the world, science couldn’t measure my excitement!). Socially, it all felt like the first day of school and the last day of summer camp in one weekend.

Thankfully, I had another event to attend later in the month to satiate my science cravings. Science Commons was a panel, moderated by Tim O’Reilly, dedicated to discussing how to make the web work for science. The discussion was cut off way too short for such an important subject. Nevertheless, issues discussed in the short time centered around web and identification standards for various types of scientific data, the perceived lack of incentives to collaborate and be online, and how citizen science makes a huge impact.

Lastly, I had the pleasure of being in London for the Citizen Science Alliance conference at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The event mostly featured the team behind Galaxy Zoo discussing the challenges they faced and the exciting new endeavors they have coming up. Their new endeavor, Zooniverse, is indeed something to get excited about. In summary, they’re offering a hand-holding process and platform to help scientists get massively large data sets online and ready to be analyzed by citizen scientists. This is incredibly important as it is a common problem I hear about and this solution not only provides the technology, but also the much needed community support when starting the process. Overall, I was very happy to be able to attend this and meet people working in the citizen science world from different countries. I personally love to see citizen science projects and involvement coming out of countries outside of the States and can only hope there will be a lot more of it in the coming years.

(photo via adactio)

I’ve been meaning to write about a lot of the conferences I’ve been to this year (hopefully will get to it in a follow-up blog post). One of the upcoming conferences I’ve been offered to attend again is Supernova, a conference about “understanding how decentralization and pervasive connectivity are changing our world”. From web privacy to web standards, Supernova is great about booking speakers who not only live and breathe the issues they’re discussing, but actively fight for the progress of them in their daily life. Here’s a few people and talks I’m looking forward to from the current line-up:

Speakers:

• Marko Ahtisaari (Dopplr)
• Kevin Bankston (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• Danah Boyd (Microsoft Research)

Talks:

• Social Networks in the Workplace (definitely a talk that’s of personal interest due to my experiences at NASA)
• Updating Copyright Law: A Fair (Use) Fight? (Jason Schultz gave a *great* panel discussion on this topic at SXSW titled Fair Use on Trial)
• The Changing World (Pervasive connectivity is altering everything from our social interactions to our cities.)
• Privacy and the Social Web
• Fun with Fun (What are the emergent properties of games and virtual worlds that will impact the broader technology space?)

Olson:
“How do we communicate how beneficial NASA has been to our society from a technological, from a national security perspective, and from an inspirational perspective?

And y’all talked about what Congress and the government can do, but one thing I find when I meet with constituent groups, we just had a group up here yesterday from all the NASA centers, some employees. And they all asked what can I do? What can I do to help you or to help make sure that the American public understands how important this is for our future?

Ms. Myers and Mr. O’Brien, I’d like to give you the first crack at that. What can we tell our constituents? What can they do to make a difference?”

[Myers answers]

O’Brien:
“You know I think the irony is that 40 years after the launch of Apollo 11 NASA suffers from a bit of timidity when it comes to unleashing the message. Now they have a natural legion of foot soldiers, evangelizers. Everyone I meet who is involved in space is deeply passionate about what they do; love what they do. They are committed to their jobs in ways most people are not. And unfortunately if they attempt to blog about it or tweet about it they get shut down. This happens all the time because the concern is that they’ll be off message.

It’s important to empower the agency and thus its foot soldiers to know that they can — they can be a part of this. If — if a flight controller wants to tweet and let her social network in on what’s going on inside mission control, assuming we’re not you know in some sort of mission critical situation that would cause danger to somebody, why not empower her to do that? But instead the message is you can’t.

So I think what Congress can do is to the extent they can streamline the rules for NASA and make it easier for them to do marketing, but also to the extent that they can avoid the tendency to get on the phone every time something comes across the bow that might — might offend somebody in somebody’s constituency. Because what that does is it cows the agency. And they need to be empowered too because if you unleashed the power of that workforce and allowed them to spread the word we could just stand by and watch them win the country over.”

Relearn the phrase “don’t burn bridges”
The quote above comes at a time where I still to this day receive emails from people inside NASA who tell me about how they were forced to shut down their personal blog for fear of being fired. Even worse, I still receive stories about people being forced by their managers to unblock people who are harassing them from their *personal* social networking accounts. The social web is a bridge between personal and professional lives and should be respected as such. Learning how to navigate this isn’t easy. Scrambling to put together a “digital policy” for employees might sound like the right solution, however, digital policies are equally dangerous due to their inability to evolve as the digital environment does. Starting off with general guidelines like “play nice” that encourage the use of social networks and respect privacy is a better first step.

Eliminate “the public”
The mindset of people in government is deeply rooted in using the term “the public” when referring to anyone who doesn’t also work in government. Not only does this term massively inhibit their ability to communicate effectively and connect with anyone, but it also frames their view for using the social web – something that “the public” uses and thus they should use as an extension of their job (instead of having a personal AND professional interest in it). This is a hard term to tackle, as I started saying it shortly after joining NASA as well. I recommend stepping down from using the term by saying things like “people will be able to better access this” or “this program allows people to get involved with XYZ”.

We need a “Freedom of Information, Except for Jerks” Act
The title of this section was joked about while conversing about this issue over dinner. The government has no standards or process in place for blocking abusive, harassing and/or all-around trolling people (see Tantek’s Troll Taxonomy). In fact, the government is so terrified of being called out for denying conversational access to someone, that they often pander to the poisonous person over protecting their own employees. As a result, “super villains” are created to feed off of the fear culture – a term Heather Champ, the community manager at Flickr, uses to describe someone who keeps coming back to haunt you forever. As Heather stated in a talk about Shepherding Passionate Users, “Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions and take actions that won’t be appreciated”.
Recommended listening for everyone: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People.

Users drop off at an accelerated rate from accessing/signing up for a new site to actually using it. Even if the sign-up process is super slick and the site is easy to use and helpful with telling users how to get started, more often than not companies forget one significant thing:

If the first impression is a ghost town until the user interacts with the service more (e.g. adds friends, follows feeds, etc.) – that will be their impression of your service and most likely their last login to it.

For Pownce, a social network I was a community manager for, this was a known weakness. I don’t have the data to show the drop-off rate from users who signed up for Pownce, but as with any social network, there’s always a large divide between active users and total users – and keeping the divide as small as possible plays a large role in the longevity of a site.

(original screenshot via Chris Messina)

Comparatively, when users sign up for Flickr, they’re shown the activity that is being created by other users on the site immediately:

(original screenshot via Chris Messina)

Additionally, Flickr always shows content other users are contributing on their service on your personal dashboard, regardless if you’ve added friends or uploaded photos of your own. In this way, Flickr is communicating that they have a live and constantly active ecosystem to participate in – making the user feel less uncertain about adding to that activity and interacting with the site.

The recommendation being – don’t use emptiness as a motivation for users to interact more with your site, even if you have super friendly instructions. Displaying example content not only shows that your site isn’t dead inside, it shows users what’s interesting without saying it.

I arrived home from SXSW at 10am, after staying up with friends until 5am, when I needed to leave for the airport. Still in the day’s clothes and make-up, I promptly collapsed for a 6 hour nap.

People:
SXSW was fabulous as always, but different for me from the first time I went a couple years ago. As many people re-tweeted from me, I always explain SXSW to people new to it that it is like having the entire internet in person, and it’s just as weird and overwhelming as you would imagine. While that factor hasn’t changed, the “meeting new people” aspect of it has.

When I first went to SXSW in 2007, I knew absolutely no one there, and was being asked how I seemed to know everyone there by the end of it. A lot of SXSW veterans say to not hang out with people you already know, that you’re “doing it wrong” by not meeting new people. On my 3rd year here, I don’t know if I agree entirely. It comes off wrong, but in talking with a friend, we agreed that we feel like the people we’ve come to know are the best of the best (with new people coming in through trusted connections). Hallway conversations this year seemed to be littered with the “what do you do” questions. I got rather tired of even entertaining these questions and took after Cal Henderson’s approach of just answering with “I write email”. I will admit one negative to staying with a group of friends while out and about is that I realize it makes me difficult to approach.

SXSW, for me, has transitioned from meeting new people, to spending quality time with people I already know and I would argue that it’s just as valuable. I did make two new friends that I absolutely adore this year: Amber Case (a cyborg anthropologist – SO much cooler sounding than digital anthropologist!) and Matt Biddulph (Dopplr’s CTO and camera geek). The geekery I shared with both of them was delightful – alas, neither live in San Francisco. On a brief side note, it was fun sharing a suite with Miss Violet Blue, with occasional drop-ins from Natalie and Karen.

Panels:
• “Back Off Man, I’m A Scientist: User Generated Discovery” was wonderful as one of the only science-related panels offered this year. The discussion circled around how unprofessional science is the best way to protect its objectivity and how Spacehack projects like Galaxy Zoo are leading the way in exploration and discovery for both the public and the professional science industry.
• “Make it So (Sexy): Lustful Design in Mainstream Science Fiction” was the type of panel I love – the kind that does not have enough time to zip past every single cool thing you should be aware of, whether or not you can keep up. The panel featured a ton of science fiction movies that displayed different types of sex/technology hybrids. This was great mind candy to consume for my Engadget column: Movie Gadget Friday.
• “New Threats to New Media: Fair Use On Trial” was the best participatory format for a panel I had encountered. In summary, the moderator would show a video to the audience and ask if they thought it should be fair use of a series of songs or movie clips, etc. based on how they felt. The moderator would then turn over to two panelists who had opposing views on if the video should be considered fair use or not. The moderator would then turn back to the audience and ask if anyone had changed their mind based on hearing the arguments – then pick someone from the crowd who had changed their mind and gave them 30 seconds to explain why. This not only had everyone paying attention, but also served as critical thinking, as I became curious about why I felt some examples were fair use and others weren’t.

Cupcakes:
I can’t begin to thank Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop (a local Austin cupcakery you should check out when in the area!) enough for sponsoring my SXSW “flashcake” experiment. I was inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s random wine parties last year and wanted to try it with cupcakes by tweeting out random locations to get free cupcakes (first come, first serve). Needless to say, it was a huge success, everyone *loved* Sugar Mama’s cupcakes, and my friends Natalie, Karen and Micah helped with optimizing the cupcake strategy (we even partnered with Mighty Leaf tea at one point, which was a great combo!).

• A video of one of the “flashcake” mobs was captured by Clintus.
• Reuters mentioned the phenomenon
• CNET says I was making all the out-of-work geeks smiling
• Wired dropped in a brief mention

353 days, 11 hours, 7 minutes and 10 seconds until SXSW 2010!

No, not a reference to my female cycle as I’m sure the rumormongers had hoped! I’m 3.5 months late on figuring out my new year’s resolution.

In my previous personal post, I stated that I wasn’t sure what 2009 was going to be for me yet. I think it has taken a few months to crystalize around the concept of vulnerability.

It started with the realization that I am a lot less shy than I used to be just a couple of years ago, and how silly I was for being shy over small stuff. I began to embrace being vulnerable within my dating life, from telling someone I used to have a crush on them to Twittering about someone I met that I thought was cute to asking a guy why he went on a date with someone else and not me. All things I used to be absolutely terrified of doing. While I anticipated feeling incredibly embarassed, the process of pushing past my threshold became surprisingly addictive and gave me a huge wave of relief. I suppose it goes in step with all the rainbows and unicorns that are supposed to appear when consultants tell brands about the benefits of being “open”.

In the exploration of vulnerability, however, I’ve discovered that it’s much more difficult to be vulnerable when it comes to work – this is an observation in other people as much as it is myself. As said at SXSW by Ben Brown, the difference between self-employed and unemployed is in your head – but that doesn’t make it any less difficult to announce to people your paycheck status when you’re trying to say, “no, really, I need more things on my plate”. And with me, I know I have trolls and stalkers who are just licking their fangs at the delight of this vulnerability (but of course, they’re also the ones who are the first to attack me every time I experience any recognition/success).

And while a low-to-no paycheck status might be great for creativity, “unemployment” can be like being sick: you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want to do, but like being sick, it’s difficult to focus past the cloud of needing to take care of yourself. This isn’t really a complaint, so much as my personal description of what it’s been like to be on the low-to-no status for a few months. I suppose this makes my other resolution to be to keep producing lots of stuff and putting it out there in the face of this financial “fog”. Good thing I have a shit ton of awesome ideas and people around me

With many creator-types unemployed or between clients, trendhunters expect a new sprouting of startups, echoing the creation of web 2.0 companies from the post-dot-com unemployed. I don’t believe that will happen in the same way. Peoples’ piggy banks are squealing and while web 2.0 companies got started with minimal money, most individuals now don’t even have enough to take the startup step forward.

Rather, I am witnessing a high tide of what I’m dubbing “pico projects” (terminology partially influenced by the recent launch of Picocool). Small projects developed by an individual with input from nearby friends as a makeshift advisory council, with little to no concern for monetization (at least at launch), just the desire to see an idea through to fruition.

Within my immediate circle, the launches of pico projects such as Huffduffer, Baconfile, Picocool and (my own) Spacehack are examples of this new wave. Projects that are more than single-serving sites, but less than a pitched business plan or even what Jason Calacanis has dubbed the $5-10k “microstartup“.

My friend and sometimes advisor to Spacehack, Ben Ward, points out that the shift from startup to pico project is not only due to a downturn (as some of these pico projects are more mini moonlighting outside of day jobs), but to the pervasiveness of tools readily available today as compared to just a few years ago. As a non-developer, this rings clear – my project in its current state uses about the limits of what I can “hack” together on my own without dependency on a developer. But this is also true for developers, as frameworks like Django have more easily allowed for the development of endeavors like Baconfile.

In mentioning this slight shift, Jeremy Keith pointed me to £5 App, a meetup for individual or two creators to showcase simple software that they decided to just go ahead and execute. I particularly enjoy this line from the meetup description:

“The discussion will range from technical (what tools/languages were used during development) to business (building communities, spreading the word, costs and rewards).”

…calling attention to the fact that these projects care more about building communities than how to talk to angel investors.

What are some pico projects you’ve come across or built in the last few months? I’ll link any I find to be interesting from the comments at the bottom of this post.

Other interesting pico projects:
• Not in the comments, but Jeremy Keith pointed me to Readernaut
• Josh McKenty, a colleague from NASA, reminded me of the TinyApps project
• Emily Chang introduced me to 4am Project
• Blaine Cook recently created TinyArchive

(the title, a reference to XFN. the picture, a reference from 2007 to my excitement to move to San Francisco.)

I’ve been debating for a while writing a post that is more personal. I don’t typically like blogging about myself, as evidence through my writing at Shake Well Before Use, and most of my personal life can be obtained through Twitter already. I always think “no one cares” to read about me – there’s so much far more exciting stuff out there to be consuming! However, I love reading my friends’ blogs and the idea that they have someone that enjoys reading their more introspective moments in hopes of gleaning some insight.

2008 was an interesting year. Interesting sounds so terribly boring. By “interesting”, there were ups and downs, some of which were captured on this site.  In work, there were a lot of great, new, rewarding experiences that I truly cherished and hope to continue. I’ve now worked in multiple industries: advertising, technology, science, government, and I could be an arse and stretch it to culinary with CupcakeCamp . But, by the end of the year, I felt like I was having empty nest syndrome – NASA CoLab went into hibernation from being a program, Pownce shut down and Yahoo! Brickhouse, where I often coworked, was figuratively demolished.

In dating, it was a year of biting the bullet and putting myself out there – both ways. I walked out of one situation, realizing I valued my independence and all the things I wanted to accomplish more than anything. I walked in to another situation, and for once lifted both of my feet off the ground.

Outside of income-related activities, there has always been my personal work. In years past, blogging took up most of my time (at my peak, I was posting 6 times a day). In 2008, I unintentionally transitioned from blogging to creating projects like Spacehack and CupcakeCamp. I can’t explain the amount of positive energy that is generated by being part of something that generates so many passionate people. Dare I say that it is no longer about the content or the context – it is about the community.

While I miss blogging as often (and I’m seriously considering starting a community management column), I realize that this is in step with why I moved to San Francisco in the first place. I wanted to be around people who actually created things rather than just talked about what everyone else was creating. I also realized that my move to SF was very much following in my mother’s footsteps. After watching Milk (a very emotional movie to watch after Prop 8 passing) and conversing with my mother about what it was like to live through that time in San Francisco, she told me that the first time she walked down Telegraph Avenue, she felt she had finally found home.

I don’t know what 2009 will be for me just yet. I’m filled with so much energy to release right now, so that’s exciting at the very least. December was a personally painful month that I’ve now let pass through me (like a storm, as one of my dear friends put it). All I can (and care to) concentrate on now is what I’m here to do and the people who need to hear what I have to say.

Spacehack launched to the public today! I’m really excited to produce a resource that myself and others felt was lacking in the online space community.

Spacehack is a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, interact + connect with the space community and encourage citizen science.

A huge thank you goes out to all my former coworkers at NASA who continue to support me in my outer space endeavors – these ideas come to fruition from a community more so than any individual.

I hope to see Spacehack continue to grow and be a valuable source of information for anyone who wants to get involved in space exploration but doesn’t know where to start.

When I started CupcakeCamp back in May of this year, I had no idea it would be as popular as it was (we had about 300 people and 500+ cupcakes attend!). It was such a rewarding experience to see people from all different industries smiling and sharing cupcakes and meeting new people (what easier way for people to meet than to start a conversation about cupcakes!?).

At nearly every event I went to, people asked me to bring it back, so I’m very happy to oblige and be throwing CupcakeCamp2 this December.  RSVP yourself here and register to bring cupcakes here.

Equally exciting, I received an email from Open Source Cupcakes who will be throwing the first ever CupcakeCamp East! I’m ecstatic that in less than 6 months of the first CupcakeCamp that it has already spread across the nation.

Can’t wait! As always, if you have questions about CupcakeCamp or need help organizing your own, feel free to ping me.