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A look at this year’s Science Foo Camp

20th December 2010
 | Kaitlin Thaney

The first video from last summer’s Science Foo Camp (“Sci Foo” for short), produced by our colleagues at Nature Video. 

The video captures the essence of the event, co-organised each year by Google, O’Reilly and Nature. Included in the piece are a number of our Sci Foo friends, from Marcus du Sautoy, and Paul Davies to Aleks Krotoski and Andrew Marr.

Sci Foo originated as an extension of an experiment by Tim O’Reilly and his colleagues in 2003. He brought together 200+ “Friends of O‘Reilly” Media (where the “Foo” in Sci “Foo” comes from), let the participants create the agenda from start to finish, putting few if any boundaries to what can be discussed.

The results were astounding, challenging the conventional idea of a “conference”. In 2006, O’Reilly joined up with Nature and Google to hold the first Science Foo Camp (“Sci Foo”), inviting over 200 leading scientists, technologists, writers and other thought-leaders to gather at the Googleplex for a weekend of unbridled discussion, demonstration and debate. We’re now in our sixth year of the event.

For more information on Sci Foo, visit our Scifoo page. We’ll be posting the rest of the series of videos, as well, so watch this space.