Conferences: Talking Open Science at OSCON, Desktop Summit and Chemical Databases Meeting

Over the last two months I have had one of my most hectic travel schedules ever. It started withOSCON, and a panel discussion about “Practicing Open Science”. This one was a bit of a surprise, as Bill Hoffman was originally presenting with Will Schroeder and Brian Wylie, from Sandia National Laboratories. As Bill couldn’t make it we decided to change the content of my section, and talk about the new open chemistry area that I have been working on for about four years now. Will went first, followed by me and a wrap up from Brian, with a nice flow between Kitware working on open science for over a decade, me growing a new area of open science (now at Kitware) and Brian giving a government perspective on open source and open science. The slides are below and on slideshare if you would like to take a look.

I thoroughly enjoyed OSCON, and would love to attend future events. The toughest thing was deciding which talks to attend as there were often multiple tracks with talks of interest to me. This was also by far the largest and most commercialized open source event I have attended so far, in the beautiful city of Portland, OR. I couldn't stick around for long after the conference as I was flying out to England on the following Tuesday, and on to Berlin, Germany Friday to attend the Desktop Summit. This was my first time in Germany, and I was looking forward to exploring Berlin a little, along with some time to catch up with a few family and friends in England before and after the conference. I talked about "Open Source Visualization of Scientific Data" on the final day of the main conference, and was very pleased to have a large and interested audience. Here I also discussed my work in open chemistry, along with a lot of the other work we do at Kitware in the Scientific Computing group.

I stayed for the remainder of the conference, attending my first KDE e.V. meeting, and was joined by Bill Hoffman towards the end of the week. Bill gave a workshop on using CMake, and I helped out with that, along with taking part in several BoF sessions and meetings. It was a very hectic week, very different feel to OSCON with a lot of great presentations, BoFs and hacking sessions. I also had the opportunity to meet up with Alexander Neundorf who was an intern at Kitware for half a year, and several other KDE developers interested in build systems, software process, testing, coverage and related areas.

Then I was back home for just over a week before braving the elements and heading straight for the path of hurricane Irene. I was invited to the 5th Meeting on U.S. Government Chemical Databases and Open Chemistry where I talked about "Chemical Databases and Open Chemistry on the Desktop". This meeting was very focused on chemical databases and the open chemistry I have been working on so hard for the last few years. It was a great experience to be able to see what others are working on, and discuss possible points for future collaboration. There is some amazing work happening in this area, and this meeting helped me gain greater clarity on how my work at Kitware can fit into the larger picture to significantly improve the landscape in open chemistry.

Thanks to Kitware for allowing me to attend, and funding my travel/other expenses, and to my wife and son for tolerating my long absences over the last couple of months. An even bigger thank you to my wife, Louise, for letting me off the hook on my first missed wedding anniversary so that I could present at OSCON! I had some great news about funding for the continued development of many of the ideas discussed in the slides, and so hope to have much more to talk about over the coming months (and years). This post is already pretty long, I hope to continue developing this work and promoting open science, especially in chemistry, materials science, physics and the bio areas. There are lots of other amazing people working in these areas too, and I feel like we are getting to a point where we can create real change to improve the outlook in scientific research.

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