As the fifth .Astronomy came to a close on Wednesday, I felt as I always do at the end of these meetings: tired, emotional and super-excited. It’s hard to explain the energy at these events. There is something almost magical in the air as the participants ‘click’ (usually about an hour in) and then begin talking, making and doing great work.
.Astronomy is about actually doing something. As Kelle Cruz and I remarked yesterday – we like ‘people that do shit’. At .Astronomy you feel that if someone has an idea we should just all try and make it happen. It could be the best thing ever, and failure is just a chance to learn. It’s not a common attitude in astronomy and it’s certainly difficult for many early-career people to think that way.
I’ve always been lucky. My PhD supervisor was very willing to let me try crazy things (he let me get distracted by creating .Astronomy for a start!). At the Zooniverse we have spent years now, just pushing code live and making new things. They’re not always perfect, but we learn every time and we have left a trail of marvellous creations on the way. Each new thing learns from the last.
We also absorb the ideas of others quickly, and encourage collaboration with new people. It’s this approach that led to the creations of some of our most interesting projects recently, such as Snapshot Serengeti, the Andromeda Project and Space Warps.
During his Keynote talk Tony Hey (Microsoft Research) showed a quote I’ve not seen before.
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, retired Chief of Staff, U. S. Army
I think I might put this on my wall. It sums up perfectly how I see much of science and could easily be the motto of .Astronomy. Tony’s keynote was brilliant BTW and you can see it here. Tony spoke about the Fourth Paradigm and told the tale of how the availability of astronomical data led to the SDSS SkyServer, which sparked the creation of Galaxy Zoo, which sparked the Zooniverse. In a way, .Astronomy was partly sparked by Galaxy Zoo too.
The folks at .Astronomy have built many projects that embrace the web fully, with an ethos of sharing and participation. These projects are changing the way astronomy and outreach are done: Chromoscope, 365 Days of Astronomy, AstroBetter, Astropy, astro,js, and the Seamless Astronomy groups ‘Bones of the Milky Way‘ paper; there are more but these are excellent examples.
So after .Astronomy 5 I’m left wondering where to take it next in order to facilitate more of these projects. There were 40 hack day pitches at this year’s event. There were so many hack day reports the follow day (the 2-3 minute slots where people show off their results) that we had to over run into coffee and use up most of lunch time too. Many of those hacks will, I hope, soon be appearing on the .Astronomy blog when people have time to write them up. Some of them are already popping up on GitHub (e.g. d3po).
The other wonderful thing about the meeting was how it once again encouraged genuine debates and discussions that sound like they might actually lead to change. The unconference sessions on diversity in astronomy went beyond the usual format and did not fall in to the trap of collectively preaching to the choir. A document has been drafted with actionable ideas. I hope it is revisited soon. Similarly sessions of the future of academic publishing were not bogged-down in the usual complaints but actually became a real debate about practical things we could do differently.
There were also highly informative unconference sessions that would not have happened elsewhere; enthusiastic tutorials of Astropy, Authorea and the merits of combining noisy classifiers are all jumping to mind. These meetings organically emerge from the crowd at .Astronomy and they’re, interactive, productive, and brilliant.
So as I ponder on the future of .Astronomy (I’d love your thoughts) I’ll leave you with some of the wonderful video hacks that were produced at this year’s event. Don’t Call Me Colin is a song about a sad exoplanet from Niall Deacon, Emily Rice, Ruth Angus and others. There is also a timelapse of .Astronomy itself in action from Amanda Bauer.
Thank you to everybody who took part, gave their time to talk, help organise the event; and who followed along online. It was a great meeting and I’m already looking forward to the next one. Long live #dotastro!
Orbiting Frog 
Enjoyed following .Astronomy online… My biggest gripe (of course) would be that you have so little diversity — you’re all astronomers (or astronomy educators)! Okay, maybe that’s just me being jealous. But I do think that it’s useful to learn from other disciplines. For example, it might be fruitful to learn from ecology (and other fields) what diversity challenges lessen when you have more women at high-level position in a field and which ones still remain. I went to ComSciCon earlier this year, which was organized by astronomers and also held at the NERD center and contained quite some overlap with the attendees at .Astronomy. One thing that really struck me then was the pitch to spread the AstroBites idea into other disciplines; that opened up a discussion about what makes it work in astronomy and what the challenges would be in different fields (ChemBites fizzled, for example). Astronomy is on the leading edge in many things, and it would be interesting to consider how many and which of those things are due to the culture of the field of astronomy and which could be transferred to other fields.
We do bring in people from outside the field, we have Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky last year who are data visualisation people, not astronomer. I was keen to get Tom Igoe in this year, who’s a hardware person and one of the co-inventors of the Arduino, and maybe get a hardware spin on this year’s meeting. But in the end he couldn’t make it, which was a shame, would have been an awesome keynote talk.