The BOSC-OBF 2021 Event Support Fund was awarded to David Twesigomwe, a PhD student based at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) - South Africa, to participate in BOSC 2021, an annual conference hosted by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF). Based on the OBF Event Fellowship program, this fund aimed to facilitate participation of diverse researchers from historically underrepresented groups at BOSC to help wider awareness and adoption of open source bioinformatics practices in the biological research community. Find more information here.

The BOSC-OBF 2021 Event Support Fund enabled awardees to register for free for BOSC 2021, an annual conference hosted by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), which promotes and facilitates the open source bioinformatics development and open science. Based on the OBF Event Fellowship program, the BOSC-OBF support fund aimed to facilitate participation of diverse researchers from historically underrepresented groups at BOSC, helping to spread wider awareness and adoption of open source bioinformatics practices in the biological research community. One of the BOSC-OBF awardees was Gemma Turon, a researcher from the Ersilia Open Source Initiative (EOSI), who writes here about her experience at BOSC 2021.

The call for application for the second round of this year’s Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship is open. Please submit your application before October 1, 2021 (save a calendar reminder).

Just announced: deadline extended to October 4, 2021!

Please apply via this Google application form: https://forms.gle/7ocmgvypiFHeFNfy7.

The OBF Event Fellowship program is aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open science practices such as open source bioinformatics resource development and dissemination in the biological research community. These fellowships are available to support both in-person and remote (virtual) participation at events such as conferences, workshops, training courses or collaborative development sprints. See more details on our webpage.

BOSC 2021, which is a track (COSI) of ISMB/ECCB 2021, will take place online the 29th and 30th of July. The complete schedule is here.

The event is being held in the Showcare platform – check out our tips for making the most of your online conference experience.

We invite all attendees to join us at the pre-BOSC happy hour at the BOSC [roundtable](http://All attendees are invited to our pre-BOSC happy hour today from 17:30-18:30 UTC! Look for us at the BOSC roundtable. https://ismbeccb2021.showcare.io/roundtables/) on Wednesday, July 28, from 17:30-18:30 UTC!

This is a guest post from Mihai Popescu, a GSoC student with CWL, which participates under the OBF umbrella. Cross-posted on the CWL forums: https://cwl.discourse.group/t/working-on-a-cwl-toil-project-with-the-open-bioinformatics-foundation/390

I am Mihai Popescu, a second year master student at VU Amsterdam in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems. I am happy that my GSoC proposal got accepted and that I have started working on the project. I attended some CWL meetings since I submitted the proposal and I got to know a small part of the community. I would like to thank my mentor Michael for introducing me to the CWL community and answering a lot of my questions about workflows.

This post is guest-posted by Federica Trevisan, an OBF GSoC student with the Wellcome Trust. Cross-posted with Federica’s blog: https://federikovi.medium.com/my-google-summer-of-code-2021-c795dd0cc794

My Google Summer of Code 2021

Well yes, I am part of GSoC 2021 💻☀️

What is Google Summer of Code

In a nutshell, GSoC is a remote program founded in 2005, in which Google connects students and organisations during the summer break from classes. In this global program the students work with an open source organization on a 10 week programming project during their break from school. In this way students can gain technical experience on real projects by “flipping bits not burgers” . It’s also a competitive program; this year only the 27% of students who submitted at least a proposal got accepted.¹

OBF students and mentors at an OBF kickoff call

Every year the OBF applies to participate as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code, a paid work experience program where students get the chance to do paid work on an open source project and open source organisations host the students to work on their projects. This year, eight projects have participated under the OBF umbrella - read more about these fantastic students and their work below:

Birds of a Feather (BoFs) are informal, self-organized meetups focused on specific topics. They are a great way to meet other like-minded community members and have an in-depth discussion on a topic of shared interest.

BoFs at ISMB/ECCB 2021 will take place each day of the meeting except the last day, at the same time as the poster session (not ideal, we know–but there are only so many viable hours in the day), from 15:20-16:20 UTC. We recommend that you choose either Thursday, July 29 (the first day of BOSC) or Wednesday, July 28 (the day before BOSC).

Thanks to funding from our sponsors, we are opening a special call for applications to the BOSC-OBF Event Support Fund. This fund aims to increase participation of members from groups otherwise underrepresented in BOSC or in bioinformatics community events in general, including but not limited to underrepresented demographic groups (country of residence and citizenship), ethnic background (historically underrepresented and other minority groups), career stages, gender identity and expression, people with disabilities and members from low income/resource organisations.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program supports and encourages diverse participation at events focusing on open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Sona Charles, a Scientist (Bioinformatics) at ICAR-Indian Institute of Spices Research, India, was supported to participate in the Great Lakes Bioinformatics (GLBIO) 2021 Conference by this award granted to her in the application round-1 of 2021. Find more information here.

In this pandemic stricken world when all conferences are taking place virtually and don’t require traveling, it has become more accessible for international participants like me. However, the cost for registration, video-conferencing accessories and childcare remain the same. Luckily, I came across the Open Bioinformatics Foundation Event Fellowship, when I was hoping to attend the Great Lakes Bioinformatics (GLBIO) 2021 Conference. I had already submitted a poster entitled “ Sequence-Based Prediction of Phytophthora- Host Interaction Using Machine Learning Methods” to the conference, which was accepted. I went ahead and applied for the event fellowship at Open Bioinformatics Foundation for its first round of 2021. Two weeks later (after the application review phase), I was informed by the Chair of OBF Event Fellowship that I was awarded the fellowship.