One of my very few non-thesis commitments in the last while was co-organising Web Art and Science camp, a one-day event held in London at the start of November. We ran it as a chance to talk about, demo and play with neat ideas in advance of Web Science 2011 and Hypertext 2011. One of our aims was to be open and accessible to people who are not strongly embedded in those communities, but instead greet with open arms unfamiliar faces, non-academics, and non-computer scientists. (Neither Web Science nor Hypertext are purely computer science by any stretch of the imagination, but there can be a bit of a stereotype in there. We need to fight that!)

How did it go? Well, I’d say! There were definitely unfamiliar faces, and we introduced the two areas of Hypertext and WebSci. Paul de Bra gave an interactive ‘unkeynote’, which I thoroughly enjoyed — more importantly, I understand from people new to the field of hypertext that they found the talk an accessible introduction. Meanwhile, although it wasn’t in my plan, I ended up running a session entitled “What’s going on in Web Science?” During the discussion, I attempted to strike the balance between introducing the Web Science concept to new bods while not boring older hands with yet another discussion about how to define WebSci. (A mini write-up of the session is here.) I’m not quite sure how well the old hands managed, but the new people were definitely positive in their feedback!

So, we introduced WebSci and hypertext. What else?

There was a wide variety of talks, including a wonderful session on narrative and what sounded like a very diverse set of demos (which I was sad to miss — the inevitable problem of parallel tracks!). As Simon Harper observed, there was a strong presence of Web Scientists from Southampton, and I agree with his assessment that the event would benefit from seeing more practising artists and writers. I see his point about the lack of archival records but please note, dear reader, we are attempting to document the event as thoroughly as we can — through blog posts such as this, the wiki resources (here), Lanyrd and Flickr. Not to mention the Twitter stream.

Of course, the above don’t constitute a formal proceedings in any way. I’d be interested to hear how other unconferences have gone about self-logging and archival, so comments would be very welcome!

As the event closed, people began talking about running a WebArtSci event next year, possibly co-located with Hypertext 2011. I’d love to talk some more about this, although I might offer a little caution about the issue of co-locating (whether with Hypertext or WebSci): it would be a very easy way to boost our numbers and profile, but perhaps at risk of excluding the people on the periphery of the communities — which this year at least, was exactly the audience we were targeting.