The OBF Event Award program has successfully completed its first 10 years.
Initially called the Travel Fellowship program, the Event Award was launched in March 2016 with the goal of increasing diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics or open science by providing financial support to selected applicants to help them attend these events.
The program was conceived as a way to “put our money where our mouths were”, as a concrete way to help increase diversity and representation in the open source / open science bioinformatics community. In April 2016, the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code donated USD$18,125 to fund the program.
In our announcement about the program, we noted that we hoped to continue the program for 10 years - which we achieved this year. So far, the OBF Event Fellowship has supported 70 fellows to attend events promoting Open Science. We are pleased that we are able to continue the OBF Event Award past the original 10-year goal. However, the program continues to place demands on our most precious resources: time and money. OBF had hoped to raise funds to support future awards, but beyond that initial generous donation, there has been no influx of funding for this program. Our annual meeting, BOSC, raises money every year through sponsorships, and historically has generated a modest surplus that has supported other OBF activities like this. Nowadays that income doesn’t even cover justified requests for BOSC/ISMB registration fee waivers. The OBF has therefore been gradually consuming its savings.
In addition to the financial challenges of the Event Award program, we are facing an ever-greater shortage of human time and energy, which the rise of AI (LLMs) has only made worse. Every round of the Event Award draws an increasing number of applications; the barrier to putting together an application has been lowered by the availability of AI. However, we still do all our reviews of the applications by hand, because we want to give all our applicants the benefit of our years of experience and understanding, especially as the factors that go into our decisions include very subtle and sensitive judgements concerning diversity. Each application is reviewed by at least two OBF Board members (sometimes more, if there is not a clear decision), and the decisions are discussed at our monthly meeting before being communicated to the applicants. Our responsibilities don’t end once we choose the award recipients: we then have to follow up with each one to check if they were able to attend the event for which they received funding, get them to write (and revise) their blog post, vet their reimbursement receipts, follow up with our fiscal sponsor to make sure the awardees receive their payment, etc. All of this takes a lot of time; none of it can be outsourced to AI.
Because of the combined shortage of time and money, we decided to reduce the number of Event Award cycles from three per year to two, in April and October. Our next round of applications will close April 1, 2027 (timed to approximately coincide with the date when BOSC abstracts are due) and the one after that will close October 1, 2027. That means that there will not be another round in 2026.
This post was not intended to be a plea for money or time, but if you’ve read this far, we do in fact need both of those. If you are interested in donating funds or expertise to OBF to support this valuable program, please contact us and let us know how you might be able to contribute.