I had this amazing AirBnB in San Francisco once, it was back in the day, before it seemed like things might be falling apart.
On the hill, it had floor to ceiling full fronted glass wall with a stunning view out over the Oakland bridge. It must have been 2012, 2013 or thereabouts.
It was an open science meeting or one kind or another. We stayed up, clambered up on the roof of the apartment, wine, chat, three am, I think I had to kick some folk out.
There is a funny feeling, landing, hitting SF, jet lagged, trying to keep up with smart people, having your ideas grate against your time zone, but then time kind of sits differently, and in a day, a day and a half, you can maybe see clearly for a moment, talk truth, see the right way of things, make a path forward, be aligned.
PLOS was in its open science open community pomp at the time. The Sloan Foundation was funding projects left, right, and centre. There were an exiting bunch of disruptors, any moment now it was all going to upend, but we had direction of travel with us, and we had funders, researchers, builders, academics, everyone interested.
There had been a string of conferences and workshops led by the then team at PLOS on topics around open science, data sharing, altmetrics. There was a close connection to the web annotation community. It felt like things were opening up, new models emerging, a sense of possibility. In their hackathon at the end of that meeting Heather and Jason just hacked together some service right there that became a thing for a while. Martin Fenner was making PLOS data available on sticks, and a small roomful of people were changing things.
I remember, though, for whatever reason it was clear that PLOS were not going to do another Altmetrics conference the following year.
A bunch of us had flown over from Europe, many of us just working for publishers, and I know Euan Adie was in the conversation, and I know Michael Habib, and I’m sure Martijn Roleandse, and we just said fuck it, let’s just ask some people for sponsorship, and lets just do the next one in Europe, and call it “1:AM” the 1st Altmetrics Conference in Europe, and I guess we had about 300 folk at that first 1:AM conference - 2014 in London
So we did, and we just cold called folk, 5K here, 10K there, and all of a sudden it was going to happen, and we rapidly needed more support, and Cat was all part of it too.
And then we did it again, the next year - and now the second conference, and well, as it as 2:AM, why not one hour more for the timezone, and so we did it in Amsterdam.
And then we did it again, and god dammit if we weren’t going to make sure that we had this one one more time zone further on, and we had it in 2016 in Bucharest.
At one point right before the main reception in Bucharest we realised that the company doing the catering had not provisioned any alcohol, did they not know what academics and publishers are like, so a bunch of us legged to to the nearest mini mart, and just loaded up on a bunch of beer and wine, and legged it back to the venue, fully laden. I know Cat was there, making it work, making it happen.
She put in so so much effort on these events, far far more than the rest of us. We had to bring in a conference organising company to help at one point, but it all really worked because of her.
One of the things I’m really proud of from those meetings was that we got enough funding to really be able to support travel for students - and I distinctly remember working through the logistics on those with Cat (and others) - and just reading through all of these great ideas from researches, and we funded them, and we brought them all to London, to Amsterdam, to Bucharest.
I’d not talked to her for a few years, Covid I guess dried up the circuit, and I’ve not been to too many events these past two years. I just heard this evening that she passed away in mid December, what a loss.
She was one of the most thoughtful and effective people I’ve ever worked with. She did a lot of good, she was there right at that moment when it was all opening up.