nodalpoint.org

I've recently been to a cool workshop called "RegCreative". The idea was to mass-curate papers into a new database. There we have the usual discussion "open" (Oreganno) versus "private" (Transfac) databases and the open one is this case is still far from big enough, but that's not my main point here.
I liked the workshop because we were actually spending a lot of time at the computer and reading papers. There were no big stars, impressive results, great publications and hypothesizes, mainly people that presented their own databases ("I've spent 500 hours to create my database" (flytf), "I read 120 papers) (flyreg), etc...) and then afterwards everyone would get back to their computers, trying to put in one of the papers from the big pile at the entrace. The problem of database curation became very obvious to all participants and they got more tired of reading papers with every day that passed... (Here is a picture from the beginning, when people were still discussing :-)
This reminds me of the hackers' conferences, like the CCC in Berlin every year after christmas (hey, sure you don't have a lot to do between Christmas and New Year's eve?), their pictures (no, this is not the only room at the congress) also look similar. The conferences of this kind can be very innovative and answer questions a lot quicker than usual.
A lot in bioinformatics can be achieved with quick hacking but many ideas are not tried because you're in the lab, don't have time to pursue a side-issue, lack the particular expert for it, etc. The advantage of such a meeting is that you can hack something together, compare the results with others, hear some talks, discuss during the break and immediately get back to the computer to implement it. You can also ask someone else who might know more about the particular idea that you just embarked on. The round-trip time after questions is 100 times shorter than usual and the environment is pushing you to continue. It's quite exhausting but I found it very productive.
I wonder why there aren't more real-world meetings like this in bioinformatics, similar to the genome jamborees. I imagine some examples where this could be very productive: Alignment improvement (different competing alignment groups with biologists pointing out problems that are directly fixed), genome browsers (ideas are tested in real-time), APIs (bugs are corrected on-the-spot), data mining (examples are analyzed together and software is changed accordingly).