I’m back, with a big announcement: next week I’ll be curating the @realscientists Twitter account!

@realscientists is a rotating-curator account, which means that every week, a different person takes over the account to post about their work and life and anything else of interest to Twitter. Some weeks they have a traditional academic scientist posting. Other times it’s a journalist, author, policy maker, an industry scientist, or anyone else who is involved with science.

Tweeting for @realscientists is kind of a big deal: the account has more than 35 thousand followers! I’ve wanted to do this for a couple years, though I didn’t apply until just recently… for reasons that seem kind of silly now. As luck would have it, the original curator for next week had to cancel, so I get to step in at the last minute. Props to the Real Scientists mods for getting everything ready in about 3 days.

I’m really glad I got the chance to do this before leaving China. As far as I can tell, there’s never been a Real Scientists curator from China before — probably not surprising, since Twitter is blocked by the national firewall …

Join the Google group mailing list to stay informed or to help with planning!

My post last week considering options for a new science communication conference series got a pretty strong response, at least relative to most things on this blog. As it turns out, there already are some people in various stages of planning new (un)conferences in the style of Science Online, much like what I was thinking about. I won’t say anything about them here because those people haven’t revealed their plans yet, but I hope they will go public soon!

I also completely forgot that Science Online was not monolithic; it had regional branches around the US and around the world, which were largely separate from the main organization. At least two of them are still holding events: Science Online Leiden and Science Online DC. (There are also branches in Boston, Denver, and Vancouver, maybe others that I don’t know about, but they seem to be inactive.) These smaller groups could play a big role in the future of the science communication community, since as several people have pointed out, it’s a lot easier to organize events that involve fewer people. Perhaps …