ScienceOnline2010 - what to do while there, what to do if you are not there but are interested?

ScienceOnline2010 is starting in three days! If you are not excited yet....well, I think you should be! And perhaps I can help you....with this post.

First, see the complete list of attendees, or, if you want more details about everyone, browse through these introductory posts. It is always good to know more about people you are about to spend two or three days with....

Then, check out the Program to see which session in each time-slot you want to participate in. Go to individual session pages right now and join in the discussions, or ask questions. Start shaping the discussion online before it even starts offline.

This is an Unconference, meant to be highly participatory. The point of the meeting is to have conversations. The sessions' titles are meant to be topics for conversations, not lectures. The session moderators are supposed to keep the room engaged and on topic, not to drone on and on in a lecture. And then, there are all those informal conversations that happen in the hallways, and during additional events, and in the hotel lobby and at the hotel bar.....

What to do if you will not be physically present but want to follow? Graham Steel has some ideas, but there are plenty of ways to follow, and to some extent participate in the meeting.

This is an Unconference also in the sense that it is open. Not just that we allow, we actively encourage participants to cover the meeting online - not just sessions, but everything that happens there. The participants are encouraged to livetweet the meeting, to discuss it in various online places like FriendFeed and Facebook, and to blog about it: either liveblog, or a series of blog posts afterwards, or one big summary post at the end.

So, follow our official Twitter account, follow the #scio10 hashtag on Twitter, and follow the Twitter List that aggregates all the participants. Subscribe to our FriendFeed room and our Facebook event. A lot of coverage will also be found on the Science In The Triangle site and blog.

All (except one) sessions will be recorded and the videos posted on the scienceinthetriangle YouTube channel. You can also search YouTube for the #scio10 hashtag later on.

The sessions in rooms D and E will also be livestreamed on The RTP stream - there are chatrooms on the side: use them to discuss in real time. We will have assigned "room monitors" who will check the chatrooms and, if they see an interesting question or comment, inject them into the real-world conversation in the room.

Likewise, these same sessions (in rooms D and E) will be livestremed into SecondLife on the RTP Island. Again, we will have someone keep an eye on the conversations there and may read out a good question out loud into the room.

We are also encouraging participants to make photographic, audio and video recordings of various events - not just sessions, but hallway conversations and other events. We hope they will interview each other. And then post all those audio and video files online and tag them all with #scio10 hashtag for easy search. We will collect everything from anywhere on the Web with that tag in one place - check the wiki (and our other communication channels) for more information when the meeting starts.

One way to warm up and get excited for the conference is to read some blog and media coverage from the previous years. Check out the collected links of coverage of the 2007 meeting, the 2008 meeting and the 2009 meeting. Of course, the 2010 meeting has already generated quite a lot of coverage (this time in reverse-chronological order) and we expect much more, so try to catch up (and add to it on your own blogs).

Finally, some of the past participants revealed much more about themselves in a series of interviews I conducted with them over the past two years. Many of them will be here again this year/week (marked with an asterisk) so you can see what they had to say about themselves, their science/Web projects, and about the conference itself:

The 2008 meeting:

Let The Beagle sail: Interview with Karen James*
An Island In the Mountains: Interview with James Hrynyshyn*
Bloggers....In.....Spaaaaace! Interview with Talia Page
What He Says! Interview with Deepak Singh*
Per Holothuroidea Ad Astra: Interview with Sheril Kirshenbaum*
How was it for you? Interview with Graham Steel
Buffy and C.S.I in the Writing Lab: Interview with Jennifer Ouelette*
From Viruses to Viral Video: Interview with Anna Kushnir*
Say 'Hi' if you see him running - Interview with Dave Munger*
A Different Kind of Handshake: Interview with Vanessa Woods*
Visualize This! Interview with Moshe Pritsker
From the trenches of Open Access: Interview with Hemai Parthasarathy
Openness is Essential Freedom: Interview with Vedran Vucic
FairerScience in an Unfair World: Interview with Patricia Campbell
Our Seed Overlord: Interview with Virginia Hughes
The mite hunting a dinosaur that could not catch a dog: Interview with Brian Switek*
The Sirenian Call? Interview with Jennifer Jacquet
Getting Publishing up to Speed: Interview with Bill Hooker*
Riding the Dinosaurs toward Science Literacy: Interview with Gabrielle Lyon
Survivorman! Interview with Aaron Rowe*
Librarians have been doing it for a hundred years! Interview with Christina Pikas*
Soapbox for Puzzle-Solving: Interview with Tom Levenson*
PLoS, it rhymes with floss: Interview with Liz Allen
Isopods At The Gate: Interview with Kevin Zelnio*
The Future is Here and it is Bright: Interview with Anne-Marie Hodge*
The Warlord in the Library: Interview with John Dupuis*
Kids with 'Dr' in front of their names: Interview with Ryan Somma*
The Cool Aunt of the scienceblogging community: Interview with Janet Stemwedel*
One of a Mind: Interview with Shelley Batts
Ebola, for your kids! Interview with Tara Smith
Cutting-edge Communication at Duke: Interview with Karl Leif Bates*
Making the Data Public: Interview With Xan Gregg*
Watch Your Shoes! Interview with Suzanne Franks*
Guarding the Coral Reefs like a Moray Eel: Interview with Rick MacPherson*
Start Them Early: Interview with Karen Ventii*
Think of a Dust-Free Keypad: Interview with Rose Reis
Turning the Tables on Me: Interview on the Confessions of a Science Librarian*
Shortly After Hell Freezes Over: Interview with Elisabeth Montegna*
Communicating Genomics: Interview with Kendall Morgan
Removing the Bricks from the Classroom Walls: Interview with David Warlick
Doing science publicly: Interview with Jean-Claude Bradley*

The 2009 meeting:

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Sol Lederman*
ScienceOnline'09 - Interview with Greg Laden*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with SciCurious*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Peter Lipson*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Glendon Mellow*
ScienceOnline'09 - Interview with GG aka Dr.SkySkull*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Betul Kacar Arslan*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Eva Amsen
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with GrrrlScientist
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Miriam Goldstein*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Katherine Haxton
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Stephanie Zvan*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Stacy Baker*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Bob O'Hara
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Djordje Jeremic*
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Erica Tsai
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Elissa Hoffman
ScienceOnline'09 - Interview with Henry Gee*
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Sam Dupuis*
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Russ Campbell*
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Danica Radovanovic*
Clock Interview: John Hogenesch - genes, clocks, Web and ScienceOnline'09*
ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Bjoern Brembs
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Erin Cline Davis
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Carlos Hotta
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Danielle Lee
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Victor Henning
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with John Wilbanks
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Kevin Emamy*
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Arikia Millikan*
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove*
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Blake Stacey*
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Daniel Brown
ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Christian Casper
ScienceOnline09 - an interview with Cameron Neylon*
Caryn Shechtman: A Blogger Success Story (an interview with Yours Truly)*