Scholar.social is a Mastodon instance that I joined in April, 2022. The goal of the instance is to serve as a social hub for scholars, researchers and scientists of all kind to connect to each other, and talk to their work and their research.

It has been really nice to be a part of scholar.social these past few months. Conversations there are not as fast paced as on twitter, but they frequently go deeper, and the atmosphere feels much more eager and open.

In the past weeks, some users in scholar.social started preparing the “Summer School”, and online, informal conference where anyone is welcome to present a 15 minutes talk to the community.

To be completely honest, at first I was a bit skeptical. How can a “present anything” conference attract any sort of coherent content? But as I signed up to attend the conference and choose the topics that I wanted to participate in, the titles and summaries turned out to be quite amazing, and I felt myself checking in to participate into more and more of them.

I guess that is the power of an cooperative community? There is no real feeling of trying to show off, or competing for stakes, and everyone seem to be proposing talks about things that really matter to them.

Also the conference website is really pretty, easy to understand, and responsive, and the times of the talk are very well distributed across time zones. All in all I feel myself very much looking forward to this.

Here are just a few of the talks that particularly caught my eye. There are many more, which you can check out at the conference’s webpage.

– “Representations of AI – Why we need to do better”
– “Imaginaries of future energy systems”
– “Frugal computing — On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.”
– “What the news gets wrong about spider bites”
– “Anti-capitalist AI”
– “Clinical trials that stopped due to Covid-19”

And many others! Looking forward to it!