Ten things I loved about ScienceOnline2012

I spent Thursday and Friday at the annual Science Online unconference at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. I had been looking forward to it since peeking in on—and even participating in—sessions last January at ScienceOnline2011. As soon as I had emerged from the swanky airport and navigated my way to the charmingly peculiar Velvet Cloak Inn I knew the first thing I loved was...

Raleigh, and NC State University. What a peaceful, unpretentious, human-scale place. And the university campus and facilities were beyond first class. I was born in Durham, England, and met my wife at university there, so I was irrationally prepared to have a soft spot for Durham, North Carolina, and by extension Raleigh too. And now I do. It's one of those rare places I've visited and known at once: I could live here. I was still basking in this glow of fondness when I opened my laptop at the hotel and found that the hard drive was doornail dead. So within 12 hours of arriving, I had...

A new hard drive. Which isn't something to love about ScienceOnline2012 maybe, but still: I now have a new hard drive. Unencumbered by applications, data, and irreplaceable personal documents, my 2008 MacBook now runs like a charm, faster than ever. This thanks to Paul Muskoff, who picked up, repaired, and delivered my laptop before the first session of the conference. He rocks. While he worked, I had nothing to do so wandered down the road and stumbled upon...

Chipotle. I could not believe my luck. I had been dying to visit one of these Mexican-themed franchise restaurants since hearing about them, more or less every week, on This Week in Google, a great podcast about cloudy and socialy web stuff. I'm pretty impressionable, so have been hunting for one every time I've visited the US. Lame, sure, but turns out it was worth waiting for. The food is filling and tasty and, if nothing else, cheap. It kept me going till the next morning, when I walked through the campus to the conference centre and got my...

Welcome package. Nothing incredible or anything, but a signal. The tiny branded notebook containing squared paper. The tattoos. The collectable Science Scout stickers. The smart double-sided name tag, including Twitter handle. The free latté. Any one of these things would have said, we had a good idea, aren't we cool? But all of them together say: we have a lot of good ideas, and wanted you to have them because we love you. And in case you missed the message, the über-organizers Karyn Traphagen, Anton Zuicker and Bora Zivkovic don't miss a chance to reiterate, like in...

The Café. The hub of the place, restoring the heady intensity of Enlightenment coffeehouses but with a digital science art gallery, science book samples, high-speed internet and random boxes of Lego. The pieces aren't the point, you don't have to play with the Lego. But the boxes say, this is the kind of conference where there's Lego. Just by being there, they help change the conversations. And conference organizers take note—this stuff says, we care about you and your experience. But of course, this was all just appetizer, because the best thing of all was...

Meeting geo-tweeps and finding that they actually do exist in real life and sometimes use more than 140 characters to say things. There was not a huge crowd of geoscientists there, but I did hang out with Chris Rowan, Jacqueline Gill, and Jessica Morrison... and met several others besides. I think it may be the first time in my life I've interacted with people, known them even, before meeting them. And, even though they may not be geoscientists, it's also fun...

Meeting social media celebrities. Don't get me wrong, I mean celebrity in its most relative sense—Stephen Fry was not at ScienceOnline2012. But the wonderful thing about social media celebrities is that they are not popular because of marketers, sylists, or scandals. They're popular because they're witty, insightful, and interesting. Maybe they're shy and awkward in real life, but... well, you can always just go back to reading their tweets. And the funniest of those came from...

The banquet. Friday evening's entertainment, impeccably organized just like everything else, was just perfect. From the semi-formal ambience, tasty food, and Kentucky Ale to the freebie shirts, mugs, and science toy goodie-bag, there was plenty to eat, do, and talk about. But the highlight was The Monti, an organized story slam. Seven SciO12'ers had volunteered to tell stories, and did so brilliantly. They were all funny, several of them were profound, and two or three were quite moving. And one of them was about the entomo-anthropology of fake lice fetishists. Or something. Read...

The sketchnotes for the full story. On-the-fly graphical notetaking was a discovery for me. Not its existence, as I'd seen these things before, but this was the first time I've tried it myself, after master scriber Perrin Ireland inspired a roomful of us would-be artists on Day 1—I'll write more about this later in the week. Expect to see more variety on this blog too, as I have returned home full of...

Renewed purpose, and countless ideas. Admittedly, I had enough to be working with for a year or two, and have never been busier in my entire life. But I realize now that the most important ideas, the ones to waste no time in executing, are the ones that make connections. Building synapses between ideas, places, data, workflows, and people—connections are what will make us agile in 2012, and beyond.

Going to this event was the highlight of my career as a blogger, such as it is, and as an online scientist, such as I am. I arrived home last night after a farcical journey. Bleary-eyed and slightly smelly, but smiling and relentlessly purposeful.