Contrary to popular belief, the last rule of BioCamp isn’t:
If this is your first BioCamp, you have to present.
We recognize that not everybody wants to get up in front of a crowd of people and start talking. That said, the format of BioCamp doesn’t work unless a non-trivial fraction of attendees volunteer to present something.
I presented at my first BarCamp, although I had no intention of presenting when I arrived that day. “Unconferences”, like BarCamp and BioCamp, start with a completely open agenda. At the beginning of the day, one of the organizers will grid out a whiteboard with the available rooms and half-hour time slots. Then, anybody who wants to present walks up to the board and writes the title of their presentation in an open timeslot.
At my first BarCamp, I was standing by the whiteboard watching people fill in their titles when a friend asked me if I was presenting anything. That was the impetus for me to volunteer to talk about entrepreneurship in Houston. I didn’t have any slides, just a vague outline in my head. But if you read my blog, you know it’s something I think about a lot.
BioCamp is an opportunity to talk about “the Big Picture.”
So, I want to encourage everyone who is attending BioCamp this year to start thinking about topics they can talk about. The audience at BioCamp will be a mix from academia, industry, finance, and services, so you’ll want to gear your presentation to a general audience. And I want to stress that BioCamp is an opportunity to talk about “the Big Picture.”
If you’re an academic, this isn’t the environment to present your latest findings on the electrostatics of DNA-DNA juxtapositions. Rather, we’d like to hear your ideas about how to improve the NIH funding process, or the future of scientific publishing, or open source science. If you’ve got an idea for a biotech startup, this is a great environment to test your thoughts and see if they generate any interest.
If you’re not an academic, we want to hear from you too. Investors might want to talk about how the current economy has affected their approach to biotech investments. Attorneys could talk about developments in intellectual property law that affect biotech. I’m hoping we’ll get some participants from NASA to talk about the unique biomedical challenges they’re facing in planning for the upcoming missions to the moon and Mars.
This is going to be our first BioCamp in Houston, and it’s one of the first BioCamps in the country. I hope y’all will turn out, present your big (and not so big) ideas, and have fun!
BioCamp Happy Hour: Thurs., Apr. 2 at 6pm at Saute Bistro.
BioHouston Chili Cook-Off: Fri., Apr. 3 at noon at BioHouston
BioCamp Houston: Sat., Apr. 4 from 9am-4pm at 100 Keck Hall, Rice University.
By the way, if you use Twitter, you can now follow BioCamp Houston.
