Going beyond - 10 simple rules of live tweeting at scientific conferences

Sean Ekins

How it began..

• Feb 11-13 attended Lysosomal Disease Network 10th Annual World symposium in San Diego –

• Walking to dinner one night with Ethan Perlstein we discussed the lack of live tweeters and the 1000 s of patients globally that could benefit from ′hearing what was going on at the meeting.

• We discussed the idea to write a paper on how to live tweet at such scientific conferences.

An editorial captures attention

The Rules

These are just a guide

• Not definitive• Not the end• Just a guide to get people started• Not a “best practice” • Provides an outline or “how to”• Experts already know the rules

How did we spread the word?

• We primarily used Twitter– Ethan’s followers >4000, my followers at start 770– We favorite’d and thanked many for RT’s

• A blog post http://goo.gl/qoodk4

Response

• Nearly 13,000 views > 900 shares in 2 weeks• Additional Rules from Twitter responses

– 11. bring extra power, sit near outlet for long sessions and recharge often

– 12. Register the hashtag on Symplur for analytics & transcripts http://ow.ly/AEHay

• Sparked discussions on twitter• Additional References

– Blogs and papers we missed

Respondents

• Cover all kinds of backgrounds in science• Ecologists, health, clinical researchers, nurses,

PhD, non PhD, patients, advocates……..• Global response

So what next?

• Do nothing – wallow in it• Let others take it from here• Or do something ourselves

– How to get more live tweeting to happen?– How to save and mine conference live tweets?– How to encourage scientists to use twitter

Why can’t tweets from conferences be like papers – we enrich them and people build on them

The challenge

• Globally likely hundreds of science conferences

• Live tweeting increasing in sciences • Tweets usually transient unless saved• How to capture the tweets and keep

discussions going?• Needs community to filter out junk tweets

Whats needed and likely outcome

• A way to store just conference tweets• This could rapidly become a massive database• An opportunity for dataminers

– Build connections across diseases– Build connections across communities– Foster collaboration

It begins here : A Mobile App for Open Drug Discovery

A flipboard for science #ODDT

iOS only

Embraced by rare disease advocates

Getting people to share data openly is a challenge

Tweets saved indefinitely

Developed with Alex Clark

Open Drug Discovery Teams – brings data from Twitter and the internet together

Ekins et al., Mol Informatics, 31: 585-597, 2012

http://goo.gl/r9NP7p

So why not use it to focus on conferences

Prepopulate with meetings and allow users to add own

- This could also be a website of conferences and tweets

#ACSsanfran XYZ reports a new synthesis – see his paper in JMC jan 2014

Content pages example for conferences

ACS Denver 2015

ACS Denver 2015 is the spring meeting of the ACS (weblink)

#ACSDenver

Tweets listed here

Collate all tweets with meeting #

Enable search of tweets for topics

Allow users to vote up or down,

filter / remove off topic tweets

(already Chemically aware – so useful for chemistry confs)

Companies / academics may want access to all content for mining

Goals

• To make all conference tweets open• Promote open science• Promote collaboration• Democratize science• Add a new dimension to conferences forever

Strategy

• Reach out to organizations for sponsorship and support

• Create a new software or database focused on science conference tweets

• Direct tweet conferences to get them to encourage live tweeting

• Ultimately live tweeting will continue to increase – we need to be ready for the deluge!

Ethan Perlstein Alex Clark Antony Williams