Announcing Science Hack Day SF!

Here’s a message from Ariel Waldman, announcing the first US Science Hack Day, happening right in the heart of Silicon Valley! Makers can post their ideas to the wiki and hack with us when the day (Nov 13-14) comes. I’m helping to organize the event. Hope to see you there! — Eri

We’re super excited to kick-off the announcement of Science Hack Day SF!

What’s a Hack Day?
A Hack Day is an event that brings together various types of geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and creating awesome things. A hack is a quick solution to a problem – maybe not the most elegant solution, but often the cleverest (e.g. mashing up APIs, datasets and web interfaces from different sources in new and interesting ways). A Hack Day is usually 48 hours long and involves a sleepover …although not much sleeping happens when everyone is either hacking or playing Werewolf. Some Hack Days have a specific focus. There have already been very successful Music Hack Days and Government Hack Days. It’s time for a Hack Day focused on Science! The mission of Science Hack Day is to get excited and make things with science*!

Who is Science Hack Day for?
Imagine a Venn diagram showing the intersection of web geeks and science geeks …that’s a pretty big intersection. Science Hack Day is for anyone with an interest in bringing science and technology together (from dabbling with APIs/datasets/interface design to biotech experiments and prototyping near-space payloads). If you’re a coder, designer, scientist, citizen scientist, hacker or just an enthusiastic person with good ideas, Science Hack Day is for you.

Give me the data already!

• When: November 13-14, 2010
• Where: Institute For The Future (124 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA, 94301 – 2 min. walk from Caltrain)
• Schedule
• Hack Ideas, APIs + Datasets (feel free to start adding to these pages whether or not you can attend!)
• Updates: follow @sciencehackday and/or subscribe to the wiki
• URLs: http://sf.sciencehackday.com + http://sciencehackday.pbworks.com/SF

How do I register to attend?
This week, we’re collaborating with scientists, technologists and designers that will help seed the event with example ideas and raw stuff to hack on. On October 1st, we’ll open up the first wave of tickets (it’s free to attend, but since we have a capacity of 100, we’ll want to ask about your interest/intentions with our daught…err, I mean, event). Sign up using your email address here to receive an email once we open up the registration process.

There are of course a lot more details to be announced (sponsors, competition categories and prizes for best hacks, etc.), so stay tuned! Any questions, interested in sponsoring or want to get in touch with us about Science Hack Day? Send emails to ariel@arielwaldman.com.

Lastly, I assembled an amazingly super awesome team (17 strong!) of science and technology people who are helping co-organize the event: Arfon Smith (Galaxy Zoo), myself – Ariel Waldman (Spacehack.org), Amber Case (CyborgCamp), Ben Ward (Yahoo! Developer Network), David Harris (Symmetry Magazine), Ed Gutman (Twitter), Eri Gentry (BioCurious), Ian Fung (UserVoice), Jeremy Keith (Clearleft), Jessy Cowan-Sharp (UMD), Kirsten “Dr. Kiki” Sanford (This Week In Science), Kishore Hari (UCSF), Mathias Crawford (Institute For The Future), Matt Hancher (Google), Matt Wood (Amazon Web Services), Natalie Villalobos (Google), Tantek Çelik (Microformats.org + Mozilla). You can follow all of us on Twitter here!

Get brainstorming!

—Ariel Waldman

(* just to be clear: you don’t need to have experience with hacking on science-related things to attend – just an excitement for experimenting with it!)

Bio: Eri Gentry is a biotech entrepreneur, citizen science community organizer, and the co-founder of BioCurious, the first hackerspace for biotech, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

More:
Check out our entire Science Archive on MAKE