Wednesday, March 05, 2008

The European Cytometry Network Meeting - 2.0 Cytometry

As announced in here, last week, the European Cytometry Network meeting occurred in Heidelberg (indeed, a very nice city in Germany), and what a nice meeting it was. The hosts, Andy Riddell and Alexis Gonzalez, were excellent, as well as most of the conferences. We were also quite happy with the overall feedback on the talk that we gave (you can download it here: Plant Flow Cytometry - Heidelberg) and with the nice contacts that were made. But enough of bla, bla, and let's have a small summary of the main ideas of the meeting.

Andy and Alexis presented us with their idea of a possible European Cytometry Network meeting that would have the simple purpose of helping cytometry researchers and related scientists to get closer to each other. For that, besides other things, a proposal for creating a website 2.0 was made. For those that are not familiar with these websites, they work similarly to Myspace, Windows Live Spaces or Facebook, where each registered user can easily connect to other users, share documents, links, interests and information, enabling a straightforward communication with other members of the online community. And all these things are usually very easy to do, even for less experiences users. It is a very interesting idea and they have already designed some interesting and appealing website, that is only in need of an appropriate server.

Of course, a physical structure for the network is in discussion for the future, but more importantly the meeting intended to create some brainstorming of people's ideas and interests on such a network. So, Andy and Alexis are eager to know what are your ideas for such a network and you can contact them at the EMBL Flow Cytometry Core Facility webpage. For sure it is not intended to compete with ISAC and National Cytometry Societies, but it is rather a congregation of information that could help when requesting for funds and that could ease the contacts at European level.

We will keep you updated on the advances of the Network.

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