As the 2014 AGU conference quickly approaches, I'm taking some time to document my time spent at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2013 in search of collaborators for the Arctic Glass project. I gave a short presentation during the polar cyberinfrustructure track at the conference. From this and other discussions held on the conference trade floor, I gathered approximately 20 contacts that were 'definitely interested' in exploring the use of Google Glass with their work. Of those 20, 7-8 contacts had definitive ideas regarding what projects they would pursue using. This is even more of an interesting metric to me now we (Scientific Computing team at AWS) are experimenting with a similar approach to finding collaborators this year at AGU. I am also very interested to find out if the Arduino-style "internet of things" will be more prevalent this year. There's a lot of promise in Maker devices to measure in-home toxins, back yard garden soil richness, and even your own biometric activities. The internet of things will rely on the rapid prototyping abilities of these types of DIY boards, which in turn means the probability federal agencies involved with local scale environmental modeling enlisting this type of sensor data collection is very high. All of this for another post for now...
Overall, it definitely seems targeting the appropriate professional event for the community you wish to engage is still a tried and true method of making collaboration connections. I am curious to see how the upcoming fall 2014 meeting pans out for AWS, because the connection I made at AGU 2013 that enabled this project was at the Toolik Field Station exhibition floor booth.
This is a good approach towards engaging the target audience. I will look forward for the update of next meeting and what was the response of people.
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