Social media and academic presentations

Daniel MacArthur of the Genetic Future blog at scienceblogs has broached the topic of using realtime online technologies (liveblogging, twitter, flickr, etc.) at science conference in a few posts, and updates with some information about a peer creating a set of slides and icons to indicate how information contained in a presentation can be disseminated:

A while back I pondered the possibility of creating icons for conference presenters to add to their first slide to alert bloggers/tweeters in the audience about whether the presented data was “blog-safe”. This was provoked by a recent episode illustrating general confusion among bloggers (in this case, me) and scientists about the use of social media at conferences.

Fellow Australian-turned-UK-resident-scientist Cameron Neylon has now put together a handy set of slides for presenters to label both “blog-safe” and “no-blogging” presentations. The slides have a ccZero license and so are freely available for download and modification; the original icons can be found on Cameron’s Flickr account and Christopher Ross’ website.

Coming from information science, my default assumption at conferences or talks is that presenters want their information disseminated as far as possible, and services like twitter and the practice of liveblogging seem the obvious way to go for real time info, provided quotes and data are accurately attributed at the time of publication. I’ve twittered about the last two professional conferences I’ve attended, and subsequently provided my notes on those conferences as publicly available Google Docs (see my BookCamp Toronto 2009 and Internet Librarian 2009 notes).

But I understand some disciplines, particularly biomedical sciences, depend on keeping their data and findings within a limited sphere of people and publications. For example, this winter I attended a talk presented as part of the Health Informatics Grand Rounds series, which is sponsored by a variety of health science departments and institutions at the University of Michigan. The talk was done by John Wilbanks, Creative Commons VP and Science Commons ED, and was about mechanisms for sharing and storing data sets online, and how such mechanisms would affect how researchers think about what information belongs to them, how they collaborate with colleagues, etc. Sharing research data is a no-brainer for me, but I’m also not trying to beat my competitors to the cure for cancer, or secure research funding for the special thing that only my lab (at least I think it’s only my lab) does.

Developing a set of symbols, or a written statement, that tells viewers what can and can’t be discussed outside the original presentation forum is, I think, a step in the right direction, and will get people talking about the issue. But, for better or worse, I think we’re moving closer and closer toward a world where people assume that information they see and that they find important can and should be further disseminated.

What do you think?