Andrew Walkingshaw – *sketching* data by creating simple query interfaces based on structured data repositories. Had similarities to the Bricks framework. Generated quite a discussion around how and who should be marking up the content. I liked one of Tim O’Reilly’s comments *you need to create the context for a set of interactions* and then gave an example of not just asking parents to contribute to a wiki about baseball games, rather provide them with a system that has all the structure of the little league games, info on who is playing when etc, and then *allow* the parents to upload information such as commentary, photos, organisational data etc *what ever they choose*. Just sitting and listening to all the real examples being cited had my head racing with ideas that i would love to implement on the internal Arup investment and technical news websites.

Josh Koarer and Jon Durant – Incorporating science into social networks. An interesting conversation around citizen science and Josh’s idea of subscribing to feeds made by / on behalf of animals at your local zoo (I would definately campaign for that – how cool would it be to get rss or twitters from your favourite bear / penguin / lion…) would probably encourage me to return to the zoo more aswell. Really liked Jon’s theme around making the context of science accessible in the built environment. He gave the example of the physical / virtual signposts along the gene-mile in Cambridge. I mentioned the BBC’s coast work and urban tapestries project.

Henry Gee – what is sci fi for? Last and really interesting session. Henry works at Nature and amongst other things is responsible for the future article on the back page – he has been soliciting one page sci fi stories from the scientific community and has been getting them at the rate of one a day – wow. It is not about visions of the future, rather a reflection on our current pre-occupations. His biggest plea was for people to write stories not scenarios…

Other notables / things to look up:

Josh Knauer of MAYA: making sensor nodes for home energy monitoring and on sale at home depot

Sara Winge at O’Reilly (conceived with Tim the FOO camps) loved the DoC cards – copies are in the post!

Ditto with Frank Rijsberman at google.org – amongst other things he was very interested in our 2007 cardsets around water, climate change and the 2008 poverty set.

Simon Quellen Field *light tube man* has a cool science toys website

scifoo prototypes on JoVE

Arnab Chatterjee (Shell Amsterdam) interesting work on innovation and gamechanger

Convergence discussion with Denise Caruso and Kim Stanley Robinson. In biotech (DC) how do you assess the risks and how do you *project* 21st century regulation. Risk analysis not cost analysis – see Denise book *intervention* for stories on transgenic food and what the FEA did. Also (KSR) the morph from capitalism to socialism may be occuring due to an increased convergence around economic, social and environmental analysis (see Joseph Schumpeters creative destruction).

Nature scifoo

flickr scifoo

technorati posts and photos

http://www.connotea.org/tag/scifoo

google blog search

and a scifoo facebook group

All in all a fantastic event – many thanks to Tim O’Reilly and the team for the invite.