An update on the Workshop that I announced previously. We have a number of people confirmed to come down and I need to start firming up numbers. I will be emailing a few people over the weekend so sorry if you get this via more than one route. The plan of attack remains as follows: Meet on evening of Sunday 31 August in Southampton, most likely at a bar/restaurant near the University to coordinate/organise the details of sessions.

I am too tired to write anything even vaguely coherent. As will have been obvious there was little opportunity for microblogging, I managed to take no video at all, and not even any pictures. It was non-stop, at a level of intensity that I have very rarely encountered anywhere before.

So BioBarCamp started yesterday with a bang and a great kick off. Not only did we somehow manage to start early we were consistently running ahead of schedule. With several hours initially scheduled for introductions this actually went pretty quick, although it was quite comprehensive.

My aim is to email this to all the email addresses that I can find on the relevant sites over the next week or so, but feel free to diffuse more widely if you feel it is appropriate. Dear Developer(s) I am writing to ask your support in undertaking a critical analysis of the growing number of tools being developed that broadly fall into the category of social networking or collaborative tools for scientists.

In a break from your regularly scheduled programme on Open Science we bring you news from deepest darkest Oxfordshire. I am based at ISIS, the UK’s neutron source, where my job is to bring in and support more biological science that uses neutrons. Neutron scattering, while it has made a number of crucial contributions to the biological sciences, has always been a bit player in comparison to x-ray crystallography and NMR.

I promised some of you I would do this a while ago and I simply haven’t got to it. But enough of the excuses. There has been a huge number of launches in the past few months of sites and services that are intended to act as social network sites for scientists. These join a number of older services including Nature Network, OpenWetWare, and others.

I’ve spent a long time talking about two things that our LaBLog enables, or rather that it should enable. One is that by changing the way we view the record we can look at our results and materials in a new way. The second is that we want to enable a machine to read the lab book. Andrew Milsted, the main developer of the LaBLog and a PhD student in Jeremy Frey’s group, has just enabled a significant step in that direction.

Rule number one: Never give your students your mobile number. They have a habit of ringing it. Our laboratory is about a ten minute walk from my office. Some of the other staff have offices five minutes away in the other direction and soon we will have another lab which is another ten minute walk away in a third direction. I am also offsite a lot of the time. Somehow we need to keep in contact between the labs and between the people.

The speaker had started the afternoon with a quote from Ian Rogers, ‘Losers wish for scarcity. Winners leverage scale.’ He went on to eloquently, if somewhat bluntly, make the case for exposing data and discuss the importance of making it available in a useable and re-useable form.

Pedro has written a thoughtful post detailing arguments he has received against Open Practice in science. He makes a good point that as the ideas around Open Science spread there will inevitably be a backlash. Part of the response to this is to keep saying – as Pedro does and as Jean-Claude, Bill Hooker and others have said repeatedly that we are not forcing anyone to take this approach.