SciFoo’09: Forming synapses in the global brain

This summer I had the privilege of participating in a unique annual event organised jointly by Nature Publishing Group, O’Reilly Media and Google. The fourth Science Foo Camp (or “Sci Foo”) took place on July 10-12^th 2009 and was hosted by Google at their headquarters in Mountain View, California. Often described as an “unconference”, the Foo format of the meeting was originally developed by O’Reilly (Foo = Friends of O’Reilly) and can be described as an intense brainstorming event. There is no formal program or topic restrictions, and instead the discussion sessions are planned collaboratively on-the-go, using post-it notes on a huge whiteboard. According to Tim O’Reilly, the trick is to break down hierarchy – anybody can organise a session by suggesting a topic and helping to kick off discussion. The participants can choose from multiple hour-long sessions taking place in parallel in various meeting rooms, all day long, with spin-off discussions continuing often till late midnight hours. It is a controlled chaos, and a very intense and creative experience.

The secret to the success of SciFoo is achieving a critical mass of scientists, artists, IT people, writers, educators and policy makers. Access to SciFoo is by invitation, and 200 participants are selected based loosely on creativity, variety of interests and ground-breaking work in their area. The goal of bringing together this unique mix of free-thinkers is to transcend boundaries, establish new collaborations, and get a glimpse at the future of science, technology and media. In the words of Tim O’Reilly, SciFoo serves a purpose of “creating synapses in the global brain”. Among the participants are many distinguished figures, including Nobel Prize winners, like this year’s attendees Daniel Kahneman and George Smoot. Marvin Minski, Larry Page, George Church, Peter Diamandis, Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”), Louise Leakey and many others made for captivating discussion environment. In fact, at SciFoo everybody is interesting, and so every spare minute is best spent talking to all the fascinating people –this is indeed the best part of SciFoo experience.

The session topics reflected the diversity of the participants, and ranged from the feasibility of artificial intelligence, through epidemics, personal genomics, neoclassical economics, open science, space travel, neurology of music and saving climate with microbubbles to science education. My personal favourite was a 2-hour session of “Lightning Talks” – 5-minute presentations on any topic, from the inflatable nature of sharks to Darwin’s least favourite teacher. Live science demonstrations by Simon Field and Theodore Gray featured magnetism, phase transitions and cooking with liquid nitrogen. Even brilliant minds let themselves be swabbed to test for MRSA. We travelled virtually using Google Earth in 3D and were invited to the sandbox of Google Wave. I also got a glimpse at the future ultra-fast method of DNA sequencing involving electron microscopy. The pace of free-flowing ideas was overwhelming, and indeed required going into the “overdrive” recommended by attendee Jorge Cham’s (author of “PhD comics”) cartoons.