ScienceOnline'09

ScienceOnline’09 was a fantastic success.

Thanks to all those who attended and offered so much of their knowledge, experience and curiosity. Please fill out our feedback form so that we can learn how to make next year’s conference even better.

More than 200 scientists, educators, students, journalists and bloggers will gather this weekend for ScienceOnline’09 — your experiences, knowledge, intellect and camaraderie will make this a fabulous conference.

Let’s take a moment to thank our sponsors for helping us to keep this event free:

Burroughs Wellcome Fund once again gave us a substantial grant to support the conference. BWFund is an independent private foundation dedicated to advancing the biomedical sciences by supporting research and other scientific and educational activities.

North Carolina Biotechnology Center once again provided us with a biotechnology event sponsorship grant. NCBiotech seeks to provide long-term economic and societal benefits to North Carolina by supporting biotechnology research, business and education statewide.

We are using the grants from BWFund and NCBiotech to give small travel stipends to our many session discussion leaders.

JMP Software once again provided a cash grant to help pay for our delicious lunch. JMP is a division of SAS, the leader in business intelligence and analytics — they’ve also donated a copy of their JMP 8 software (worth $1500), which we’ll have as a drawing prize on Saturday.

Science In the Triangle is a new sponsor this year. This site is an evolving experiment in community science journalism and scientific-community organizing. If you are based here in the Triangle, think about how you might collaborate with the site to spread news of your organization or research.

Blogads has sponsored many of our BlogTogether events over the last four years and once again made a donation to this conference. They pioneered blog advertising in 2002 and trail-blaze today.

We are using the donations from JMP, Science In the Triangle and Blogads to feed everyone, with good coffee in the morning and delicious sandwiches at lunch.

NC Museum of Life and Science, which last year arranged for the awesome grab bags, this year stepped up to be our institutional partner (to handle our funds). The museum exists to create a place of lifelong learning where people, from young child to senior citizen, embrace science as a way of knowing about themselves, their community, and their world (I’m there many weekends with my daughters).

Sigma Xi once again is hosting us — for free! — in their beautiful center. Sigma Xi was founded in 1886 to honor excellence in scientific investigation and encourage a sense of companionship and cooperation among researchers in all fields of science and engineering.

Enrico Maria Balli, who is traveling from Italy to join us, made a big cash donation via our PayPal button, and David Kroll, our co-organizer, keeps dipping into his own pocket to help make the conference unique.

Please show your gratitude to these sponsors and donors by visiting their sites and verbally thanking their representatives at the conference.

Other organizations, companies and individuals are volunteering or donating materials for the grab bag of science swag. We’ll thank each and every one of them by name soon after the conference. For now, though, a hearty thank you to the collective bunch for their efforts to make the event a success.

The conference is three months away, but we’ve already hit our limit — the Sigma Xi Center comfortably seats around 200, so we have to stop registration. But since we expect some people to pull out for one reason or another as we get closer to the event, we’ll take names for a waitlist. Send us a message — — and we’ll let you know if and when a seat opens up for you.

See who’s already registered.

Get ready, get set, go. We’re busy planning an even bigger and better science blogging conference. Plan to join us in January 2009 in North Carolina. Registration opens Sept. 15, 2008. Register here.

See what we’re planning — we use the conference wiki to detail the agenda and more.

The second annual North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, held January 18 and 19, 2008, was an unqualified success. Find a comprehensive listing of links (compiled by the tireless Bora) to the many blog entries and video clips posted before, during and after the conference to learn about the conversations and networking at the conference.

Like our inaugural event, this second conference was a collective activity — many, many organizations, companies and individuals pitched in, in ways large and small, to keep this conference free, attendees fed and the discussion lively. Please join us in thanking them. (We thanked the sponsors of the first event here.)

Leaders
As before, Bora Zivkovic is the inspiration for the event, and his daily cheerleading in spreading the word was simply awesome. Brian Russell was behind the scenes all year, providing us important support and technical advice. Wayne Sutton, newly appointed to his job as online community organizer for NBC-17, crisscrossed the Triangle, all the while trying out every new online networking tool that came to his attention. Wayne and Brian streamed or recorded many of the conference sessions, broadening the audience of the conference. Tola Oguntoyinbo set up the Conference Commons that aggregated blogs posts, Flickr pics and other content tagged scienceblogging.com. Paul Jones was our institutional contact, offering ibiblio.org support; with his help, UNC-CH School of Journalism and Mass Communication once again provided a home base for our finances and accounting (by Ken Hales), and the UNC Health Sciences Library allowed us the use of its fantastic computer lab for the blogging skills session.

Donors
Even before our 2007 event was over, Russ Campbell of Burroughs Wellcome Fund was urging us to think bigger, and helping us win the funds to do so. The substantial grant from Burroughs Wellcome anchored the rest of our fundraising. Roger Harris, Chris Brodie and Rosalind Reid of Sigma Xi also pledged their support at the first conference, and that led to Sigma Xi offering its beautiful building for the event. Interim Executive Director Linda Meadows gave us a nice welcome (and sent a touching congratulations note). Meg Murphy worked with us over many months to plan the best use of the space, and she calmly took in our mercurial program changes. JMP Software, was another repeat sponsor and cash donor. New donors this years were the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, The Hamner Institute for Health Sciences, CrossRef and WNCN NBC-17 — their generous gifts allowed us to guarantee an ample supply of coffee, good food throughout the day (including vegetarian options) and travel grants to many of our discussion leaders.

Science lab tours
This year, we introduced pre-conference activities including visits to local science labs. Karl Bates at Duke University (he’s just unveiled a cool new site, Research at Duke) helped to line up three popular lab tours. (Full disclosure: Duke is my employer.) Erin Knight at the Hamner Institutes, Cyndy Yu Robinson of the EPA, and Roy Campbell at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences also set up and facilitated tours of labs at their organizations.

Grab bag of science swag
Once again, we worked hard to put together a grab bag filled with useful, interesting and fun resources — not just stuff, but science-related materials that could inform conference attendees and then be shared with the libraries, schools and newsrooms in the communities of the attendees. The Museum of Life and Science (cool new website) and American Association for the Advancement of Science, at the instigation of Troy Livingston, VP for innovation & learning, stepped up to provide awesome canvas tote bags. And into those bags we stuffed materials from ACD Labs, American Scientist, The HMS Beagle Project, Campbell-Kibler Associates, Columbia University Press, Coral Reef Alliance, Discover, HarperCollins, Michigan State University, MSNBC, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, National Geographic Society, Nature, OpenHelix, Oregon Public Broadcasting, PLoS-One, Project Exploration, Science News, Scienceblogs, Scientific American, Seed Publishing, Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project, The Scientist, Wired and Wired Science.

Discussion Leaders
The conference offered 14 sessions in all, and each session was led by one or more individuals. See the program page to see who did what. Special thanks to Adnaan Wasey and Abel Pharmboy for very ably filling in as discussion moderators at the last moment. The rest: Dr.Hemai Parthasarathy, Janet Stemwedel, Adnaan Wasey, Kevin Zelnio, Karen James, Rick MacPherson, Peter Etnoyer, Jason Robertshaw, Vedran Vucic, Suzanne Franks, Karen Ventii, Patricia B. Campbell, ScienceWoman , David Warlick, Martin Rundkvist, Shelley Batts, Sarah Wallace, Anne-Marie Hodge, Anna Kushnir, Brian Switek, Xan Gregg, Jean-Claude Bradley, Tara Smith, Becky Oskin, Dave Munger, Chris Mooney, Jennifer Jacquet, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Jennifer Ouellette.

Volunteers
My mother, Cheryl Zuiker, wanted to see me in action, so she volunteered to work the registration table at the conference. Elle Cayabyab Gitlin and Abel Pharmboy also helped greet people, and Brian Switek and Martin Rundkvist passed out T-shirts and grab bags. Rob Zelt picked up the morning pastries and got them to the hall on time. Rob and Wayne and Brian and Bora assisted during the Friday skills session. All those heavy grab bags of science swag? It took a crew to pack those: Ernie Hood, John Rees, Wayne Sutton, Bora Zivkovic, Andrea Novicki, Troy Livingston, Brian Russell and Jonathan Tarr.

The Food
Meals were catered or ordered from Fetzko Coffees (Brian and Ruby suggested this), Weaver Street Market, Saladelia Cafe, Locopops and Bullocks Barbecue. The Friday dinner was held at Town Hall Grill. So, thanks again to all the individuals and organizations supporting our free, public-understanding-of-science conference.

If I’ve missed you, please tell me so that I can acknowledge your role in making this event so successful.