Science Foo (scifoo) 2009 registration (courtesy Duncan Hull)
I just wrapped up an amazing weekend participating in the fourth annual scifoo gathering at Google headquarters (the Googleplex) in Mountain View, CA. The 2009 scifoo camp boasted a fascinating and stimulating array of stars from the science/tech community: Dean Kamen, Marvin Minsky, Bill Nye (the science guy!), Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, George Church, and many, many more. Best of all for Hub readers is that I was able to dig up some amazing scoop about science and technology breakthroughs that are in the pipeline. Stay tuned for several posts to follow in the coming weeks!
For those who don’t know what science foo is, here is the quick rundown: each year an informal, open format gathering of about 200 leaders and innovators in the sciences are brought together at Google headquarters to share ideas, network, and debate. Scifoo is the creation of O’Reilly, a leading publisher of books on information technology (foo stands for friends of O’Reilly), and is now sponsored by O’Reilly, Google, and Nature. As part of the ‘unconference’ genre the event has no predetermined schedule or agenda, but rather the attendees figure it all out spontaneously at the beginning of the weekend long event.
Charlie’s Cafe and the large accompanying dining area in building 40 is ground zero for scifoo. As a former Google employee, it was quite a trip for me to be back at the Googleplex. I hadn’t eaten in Charlie’s Cafe since I left the company in 2005. The area was decked out with free books from O’Reilly and Nature, tents and chairs were laid out in homage to the original O’Reilly foo camp in which they actually do camp outside, and tons of gadgets and demos from attendees were on display.
Ground Zero at scifoo - Charlie's Cafe (see me in the front with white shirt looking at phone, as usual) (courtesy: scholarly kitchen)
The experience at scifoo camp is mind blowing. Hour after hour you are immersed in debates and discussions, sometimes one on one with a person of interest, other times in larger sessions with ten or even one hundred people. Immediately when I entered scifoo things got rolling as I bumped into Delicious founder Joshua Shachter and Esther Dyson. It turns out that Joshua is well versed in the singularity meme and we had an interesting discussion. Hopefully Joshua will soon be writing a guest post for the Hub.
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