This year I got lucky to receive an invitation to SciFoo. The concept is kinda hard to describe, but the outcome is pretty awesome. The main point is: you take a bunch of interesting people from all walks of life (scientists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, artists), put them in a box, shake it, and see what happens.
From my point of view the result is simply an awesome event. The curation of participants tends to skew attendance towards the extroverted end of the spectrum and I truly enjoyed that. As side effect the quality of talks and pitches where extraordinarily high, especially compared to regular conferences (unfortunately many brilliant scientists are terrible presenters).
The interdisciplinary mix was awesome for me to get some feedback on my various side projects (there are always plenty of those, as I unfortunately have about the attention span of a goldfish).
Also I particularly liked the discussion about the inner working of science and academic institutions. But the best take-home message from SciFoo was definitely the fact that I met so many enthusiastic people (and my little proton made some friends as well as you can see from the pictures.
Big thanks also here at Cat Allman and the whole organizing team. It was a truly amazing event and if you ever get an invitation you should move hell and earth to be able to make it.