François Grey explained at Lift08 the profound implications of citizen cyberscience for the public understanding of science, and for scientists' understanding of the public. Two years after his talk, François sent us an update on his latest work.

Two years after appearing at Lift, my life has changed completely. I can’t blame that all on Lift, of course! I was about to move a few months later from gentrified Geneva to bustling Beijing, which is a life-changing event in itself. But in some sense giving that talk, to that sort of community, at that particular time, was a turning point for me.

Certainly, it was light years from the typical scientific meetings I go to. I mean, imagine an academic conference where scientists dance on stage during the break to psychedelic music – not likely! And besides being funky, it exposed me to a lot of young people doing really neat stuff on the Web. That was encouraging, because I was trying to get an embryonic project going myself.

So at the end of my talk, I announced the intention to start a Citizen Cyberscience Centre publicly for the first time. I knew I was sticking my neck out a bit, as the center had not been officially approved by the partners: CERN, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the University of Geneva. But I had no idea just how many complications we would face getting that approval, both due to management changes amongst the partners, and legal wrangling about the wording of the agreement.

And when the ink was dry on the agreement – which committed no one to spend a centime - we faced the next big challenge: funding! A year later, and after coming perilously close to throwing in the towel a couple of times, we’ve finally made it. I say we, because colleagues like Christian Pellegrini at UniGe and Ben Segal at CERN were enormously supportive the whole while. We now have projects with IBM and HP, and I’ve been awarded a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship to develop the Citizen Cyberscience Centre further.

So two years later – two and a half, really – we’re about to have our first really big international event, a Citizen Cyberscience Summit, hosted at King’s College London on 2-3 September. It won’t be as funky as Lift, but it will still be cool. Scientists talking with citizens, rather than with each other. Whoa, risky! Who knows, maybe someone will even start dancing on stage? In any case, it is in some sense a godchild of Lift, so thanks to all you Lifters for encouraging that dream to fruition!

Learn more on the Summit here!

Henriette is an online community specialist. She talks about how we should all enjoy the chaos.

“Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.”, Gregg Easterbrook

Somebody suggested we add a "lift by the numbers" section on the site's about page, and I decided to act on this recommendation as it gives an perspective what has happened in the past three and a half years.

4'000 attendees from 60 countries.

8 events held on 3 continents in 3.5 years

2 million visits and 13.5M page views on liftconference.com per year (full stats)

450+ articles and interviews in national (TSR, Bilan, RSR, Swissinfo) and international (BBC, CBC, BusinessWeek, FastCompany, Wired, AFP, Europe1) media

200+ talks available free in video

5000+ members in the Lift community

180+ speakers from more than 40 countries

Lift @ home events happening in Toronto, Tokyo, Barcelona, London, San Francisco, Brussels, Barcelona, Zurich, New York, etc.

Link

I was looking for a trend on Google search earlier today, and quickly checked the impact of the Geneva conference on searches in Switzerland. Unsurprisingly there is a growing spike in searches, corresponding to the boost of traffic we have on our servers during the conference.

2009 (Lift09, Feb. 25-27)

2008 (Lift08, Feb. 6-8)

2007 (Lift07, Feb. 7-9)

We added a new feature which allows you to see the archived pages of all past events.
Lift06, Lift07, Lift Asia 07, Lift08, Lift Asia 08, and Lift09 (the list is getting quite extensive!), all the pages are now migrated and accessible via a drop down menu. You can navigate each event's pages by using the links that will appear on the right.

You can now see Lift06's program and participants, the Lift07 experience (formerly known as Lift+), or the first ever Lift Asia homepage.

You can always easily guess each edition's web location, it is either /liftxx, /lift-asia-xx or /lift-france-xx where xx is the last 2 digits of the edition's year. Yes, easy.

Tiburon-TV runs an interview of the folks of Tagcrumbs, a startup that was created after the founders met at Lift08. It is another of this cases where the value the conference creates comes to light, it's pretty exciting for us :)

Finally a startup whose founders met at the Lift conference (Lift08): Social placemarking company Tagcrumbs.com - founded by Benedikt Foit, Cornelius Rabsch and Sascha Konietzke. The three young Germans are studying and working in Paris, Ireland and Germany. As „business guy“ Ben puts it „Tagcrumbs allows you to discover those little things that might give you interesting information about the places you visit and share them with your friends, family and the world. You can build a mini community of people you know and recommend places you care about.“

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Lift lab is a research agency that helps companies and institutions understand, foresee and prepare for upcoming changes triggered by technological and social evolutions.

We strive to translate insights on innovation into actionable knowledge based on field and desk research studies, strategic review, event creation, and prototyping. We are based in Switzerland and operate internationally. Our clients include the French Ministry of Industry, UBS, McKinsey and Swisscom.

Geneva, part of humanity

Situated at the heart of Europe, at the crossroads of every commercial, cultural and spiritual route, Geneva was the cradle of some of the greatest humanitarian ideas. Calvin, Rousseau, Dunant and many others contributed to its distinction. Similarly, international et multinational organisations established their head offices there, contributing further to its renown.

This international City of Geneva has scarcely more than 190 000 inhabitants, of which around 40% are foreigners, représentatives of 180 nationalities. This extraordinary cultural input, linked to the spirit of enterprise of both its authorities and population, justifies its reputation as an open city, a meeting place for currents of opinion, a window on the future.

At the turning point of technology

Geneva is the capital of one of the world's oldest technologies - watchmaking. Mechanical engineering and micro-electronics are thus the natural fields for the city's industrial sector. Telecommunications, information technology and artificial intelligence have found fertile ground here. Telecom, the world's biggest trade show for future technologies, stakes its future on Geneva.

Geneva is home to the International Telecommunications Union and CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, where the World Wide Web was developed.

Charm and culture

But Geneva is also the lively, lakeside districts of Pâquis or Eaux-Vives. It is an attractive old town, built around its majestic cathedral. There are the quayside, gardens et wonderfully kept parks. Exciting museums are there to be explored, dedicated to art, history, nature and time.

While browsing DailyMotion I found this video of Art and you made at Lift08, showing all the activities organized that year in the the Lift experience. Check it out it's really cool, and will give you something to watch while we prepare the first announcements about the Lift09 experience!