BarCamp: Technology Foresight and Statistics for the Future

In the last two decades a drastic renewal has occurred in Statistics and in all the fields that involve Statistics. New requirements have arisen from new kinds of data, while technology has increased the ability of exploration and computation using massive amounts of information. As a result, more and more disciplines have started making an intensive use of statistical methods, driving the development of novel tools and providing new questions to be answered in a wide range of new application settings. In general, the production and the communication of results have changed in an extremely rapid way. The aim of this paper is to introduce the BarCamp as an innovative way of producing and communicating statistical knowledge. For this purpose, we propose an algorithm to organize a scientific BarCamp and we describe it in detail in Sect. 2. In Sect. 3 we describe the BarCamp held at Politecnico di Milano and we discuss the vision of Statistics for the next 25 years emerged during the event. Finally, some conclusive observations are drawn in the section “Conclusions”.