BOSC 2018

BOSC 2018 will be June 25-30, 2018 in Portland, Oregon as part of a bioinformatics community conference co-hosted with the Galaxy Community Conference. More details will be forthcoming after BOSC 2017.

BOSC has been a part of ISMB since its inception, and we greatly value our relationships with the ISCB management and the ISMB community. BOSC 2017 as part of ISMB/ECCB 2017 in Prague, was an exciting and successful meeting.

Because of our continuing focus on broadening and deepening the BOSC community, we've been exploring ways to reach those in the bioinformatics community who aren’t already part of the audience attracted by ISMB. As part of that exploration, we have looked at other organizations and conferences that have been successful at establishing a strong and growing community of participants. One such conference is the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC).

After much discussion and planning, we'll be helping organize a bioinformatics community conference in 2018 that includes both GCC and BOSC. We hope this will help serve the open bioinformatics community in a few ways:

• It creates a conference with an explicit focus on development, support and maintenance of the interoperable software tools and libraries that enable modern scientific research. We believe the only sustainable way to provide the infrastructure needed for high throughput analyses is to build cooperating, open, diverse communities of programmers and biologists. This conference is where we hope to build and deepen this community.

• It includes two dedicated training days by members from both the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and Galaxy communities. This enables focused training on useful tools and approaches, making the conference attractive to anyone who wants to expand their skills.

• There will be two integrated days of collaboration following the conference, merging BOSC Codefest and Galaxy's Developer and User Hackathon Days. We hope the integrated collaboration days following training and the conference talks will allow new and existing members of the community to attend and build working relationships.

• We're hosted at a great venue in Portland, Reed College, providing an affordable and fun experience for anyone who wants to attend.

We would like to emphasize that this is an experiment for us and we aren’t looking to sever our strong ties with ISMB. We're planning to evaluate the combined GCC and BOSC experience in 2018 and welcome community feedback on all of these thoughts and plans.