By Scicurious, PhD

By Scicurious, PhD

The Next Generation Science Conference

The most interesting scientific meetings for the participants are small, with lots of time for informal interactions and discussion of not-yet-published results. They sometimes happen in remote or unusual locations and are often funded by foundations or agencies rather than scientific societies. Such meetings have many drawbacks that go against the principles of open science — they encourage cliques, exclude many people who may be interested, and may fail to make a broad impact outside the participants. The documents that come out of such meetings, often edited volumes running hundreds of dollars, look good on a shelf but have little urgency or value. Journalists and the public may not even know that an interesting meeting is happening! This session will explore ways to create hybrid conferences, that combine the focus of a small meeting with a broader communication and publication strategy. The questions include: When is streaming media useful? How best to integrate remote participants? What kind of video product after the conference is most useful? How can a small meeting accomplish open access publication? What kind of advance timeline is necessary to catalyze the participants? How can such meetings be leveraged for outreach opportunities? Discussing how scientific societies and other scientific non-profits can work with science bloggers to increase the outreach potential of both. More organizations are becoming interested in recruiting bloggers, and many scientist bloggers are interested in blogging meetings related to their interests. We are interested in bringing the two together, and sharing our experiences as bloggers who blog meetings, and as organizers for societies that have worked with bloggers. How are bloggers different from mainstream reporters? Why should an organization work with one? How should organizations work with bloggers in terms of registration, setup, and facilitating their work? From the blogger’s end, what are organizations looking for in science bloggers, and what should we expect from the organization? What are best practices of blogging conferences? How do you approach an organization about blogging for one of their meetings?

i) Intro: Who we are and what experience of “next generation conferences” we have…

ii) Organiser’s perspective

a) What do you want to get out of the meeting and how do you measure success?
e.g. reach a broader audience, raise awareness of your activities, stimulate online conversation, drive traffic to your website.

Tracking traffic?  Amount of engagement you’re getting?

b) How do you leverage your meeting for outreach opportunities (if appropriate)?
Leveraging large meetings like SfN for the public is harder. How do we get people to follow you for this?

Using platforms like Scientific American which are more consumer focused. Could a society form a temporary media partnership with an online community or consumer focused science site (e.g. Lindau/Nature http://lindau.nature.com/)

c) Identifying bloggers and how to treat them
How do you decide which bloggers to invite?

Are there key people in the field already writing for a major blogging network?

How do you make a one off thing a big success?

Tapping into existing communities. Noah Gray (Nature Editor interested in Neuroscience) did a group blog where he pulled in bloggers going to the SfN meeting to write single posts. It was really popular.

• Consider setting up an official blogging team

• Give bloggers Press credentials

d) Do you want the online aspect of the event to be real-time, an archive or both?
real-time coverage

• Encourage all participants (not just the official blogging team) to take part online – set a hashtag for the event in advance and publicise it widely in pre-event emails as well as on signage at the venue itself during the event.
• If you expect lots of tweets, do you want to do anything with them? Can aggregate them using a twitterfall app and show this on a screen at the venue (some find this distracting – depends on the event). Can crowdsource questions via Twitter in real-time but need to assign someone to keep an eye on the stream.
• Live-streaming – various sites online let you do this for free (assuming you don’t mind the adverts, you can pay for a premium account to remove them) e.g. LiveStream for SoNYC http://www.livestream.com/s_o_nyc. Or, you can arrange the streaming yourself e.g. RiverValleyTV did the Science Online London coverage http://river-valley.tv/conferences/solo-2011.
• Need wired internet connection, good microphones for the speakers (and consider a roving mic for audience questions)

post-event archiving

• Lou’s a huge fan of Storify http://storify.com/, a free online tool that enables you to create storyboard archives of events by pulling in “elements” from Twitter, FB, YouTube, Instagram and more and letting you curate and organise the content into a permanent record.
• We keep the scientific record in terms of papers, but these are very static records and often published a long time after an event (i.e. the research) has happened. Tweets and other online banter (G+, Friendfeed etc) talk are much more immediate – at the other end of the conversational spectrum.
• We’ve created Storify archives for all of our major events e.g. Science Online London http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/category/science-online-london-solo and an individual example: http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/2011/09/07/science-online-london-2011-day-1-storify-of-the-keynote-by-michael-nielson-solo11
• every SoNYC event http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/category/science-online-nyc-sonyc and individual example:http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/2011/09/21/science-online-nyc-sonyc-5-enhanced-ebooks-bookapps-the-promise-and-perils,
• each day of this year’s Lindau meeting http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/category/lindau-nobel-laureate-meetings-lnlm and individual example: http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/2011/06/30/lindau-nobel-laureate-meeting-wednesdays-storify-lnlm11
• Video archives
• Tracking engagement – talking about John’s app that we use for SoNYC and Lindau. Also online tools such as topsy http://topsy.com/

iii) Blogger’s perspective
(based on this: http://scienceofblogging.com/guest-post-how-to-blog-a-conference/)