Science in the open » Sci - Bar - Foo etc. Part III - Google Wave Session at SciFoo

Description

Google Wave has got an awful lot of people quite excited. And others are more sceptical. A lot of SciFoo attendees were therefore very excited to be able to get an account on the developer sandbox as part of the weekend. At the opening plenary Stephanie Hannon gave a demo of Wave and, although there were numerous things that didn’t work live, that was enough to get more people interested. On the Saturday morning I organized a session to discuss what we might do and also to provide an opportunity for people to talk about technical issues. Two members of the wave team came along and kindly offered their expertise, receiving a somewhat intense grilling as thanks for their efforts.

I think it is now reasonably clear that there are two short to medium term applications for Wave in the research process. The first is the collaborative authoring of documents and the conversations around those. The second is the use of wave as a recording and analysis platform. Both types of functionality were discussed with many ideas for both. Martin Fenner has also written up some initial impressions .

Naturally we recorded the session in Wave and even as I type, over a week later, there is a conversation going in real time about the details of taking things forward. There are many things to get used to, not leastwhen it is polite to delete other people’s comments and clean them up, but the potential (and the weaknesses and areas for development) are becoming clear.

I’ve pasted our functionality brainstorm at the bottom to give people an idea of what we talked about but the discussion was very wide ranging. Functionality divided into a few categories. Firstly Robots for bringing scientific objects, chemical structures, DNA sequences, biomolecular structures, videos, ...

Original URL

http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2009/07/19/sci-bar-foo-etc-part-iii-google-wave-session-at-scifoo/

http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2009/07/19/sci-bar-foo-etc-part-iii-google-wave-session-at-scifoo/