This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Lots of news for our science online community.
ScienceOnlineNOW
The ScienceOnlineNOW website is now live. This will be the hub, the central place, for all of our activities.
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ScienceOnlineNOW is the home of ScienceOnline, a non-profit organization that facilitates discussion about science through online networks and face-to-face events.
From there, you will be able to access the archives of the past conferences, including ScienceOnline2012 (and its wiki), ScienceOnline2011 (wiki), and soon, once we put all the pieces together, the archives of saved information about the older conferences (2007-2010). You'll find all the relevant news and updates on all of our activities.
ScienceOnline2013
Yes, we have the date and location for the seventh event - ScienceOnline2013. We will again enjoy the hospitality of North Carolina State University and its wonderful McKimmon Center.
The date: January 31st through February 2nd, 2013.
Check out the organizing wiki where you can add suggestions for sessions you want to moderate. Add yourself to our mailing list so you do not miss the important updates. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Google Plus and check out the #scio12 and #scio13 hashtags on Twitter.
Other ScienceOnline events
Our community is growing. The main event in Raleigh is not capable of hosting everyone who would like to come. So people in our community decided to organize their own events modeled after ScienceOnline and following its core principles.
There is Science Online London in fall (learn more), preparing for its fifth event this year.
Science Online New York City follows a slightly different model - it is a monthly event.
This year for the first time, there will be three ScienceOnline events (or series of events) on the West Coast - in Seattle, Vancouver, and the Bay Area.
On April 13th, 2013, there will be the first Science Online Teen in New York City - stay tuned for more.
Our online tools
Over the past few years, we have developed a couple of online aggregators for science news, specifically for science coverage on blogs. First we built Science Blogging Aggregated (aka Scienceblogging.org) (learn more), a relatively simple aggregator of feeds from major science blogging networks, group blogs and news blogs.
A little later, we developed a more complex aggregator - ScienceSeeker.org (learn more). We keep developing it further - it now has many of the functionalities of ResearchBlogging.org, plus ways to filter the information in various ways.
We intend to develop it further - adding additional sources of science news, conversation and information pooled from other, non-blog platforms, including traditional media sources, social networks, and more.
But the most important new development in our plans is the Science Concierge, an advanced search engine with a human editor touch, including a system for micropayments, microgrants and crowdfunding for science communicators and others. This would enable readers to financially reward writers, granters to be matched with grantees for various projects in science communication, education, citizen science, small research projects and more.
But building this takes time, effort, skill and money. Thus, we have applied for some grants recently. For one of these grants YOU can help us. We have applied for the Knight News Challenge. Proposals that get most "Likes", shares, reblogs and comments have the greatest chance of getting funded, so please go to our proposal and give it some love! Thank you!
And stay tuned - more updates will be coming soon.
