Late July in Toronto: DemoCamp and Science 2.0

On Tuesday July 28 I’ll be at the Toronto DemoCamp. I’m looking forward to meeting the designers, developers, and developers who’ll be there, seeing what you’re working on, and showing you what I’m working on.

The following day I’ll be speaking at a Science 2.0 event organized by my friend Greg Wilson. Here are the forward-thinking scientists I’ll be joining:

• Titus Brown: Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
• Cameron Neylon: A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
• Michael Nielsen: Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
• David Rich: Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
• Victoria Stodden: How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method

I am not a scientest, nor do I play one on TV, so why me? Because back in 2000, Greg commissioned me to write a report entitled Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration. Greg was then working with the Los Alamos National Laboratory on ways to help scientists make better use of the tools of computation as well as the methods of online collaboration. I had recently finished my book Practical Internet Groupware, I was exploring what we would now call the Web 2.0 landscape, and I was thinking and writing a lot about how these open and loosely-coupled modes of communication could enable the sort of collaboration at the core of science (and other kinds of academic endeavors) in powerful new ways.

Nearly a decade later, that vision is becoming a reality. I’m really excited to meet these folks, whose adventures I’ve been following through their blogs, and hear about their experiences at the forefront of what I believe will be a new golden age of science.

In my own talk, I’ll review how own current project tackles the challenge of social information management, and aims to democratize the computational way of thinking that enables us to wire the web.