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The following outlines a potential new grant programme, subject to approval by the OBF membership in a formal vote, which the OBF board would hope to launch this year.

Motivation

In 2016, the OBF introduced a “Travel Fellowship” to help individuals attend meetings, aiming to improve diversity in the bioinformatics community. Awardees were reimbursed (with receipts) after the event in which they participated, with a standard cap of USD $1000. The Travel Fellowship was later renamed the “Event Fellowship” reflecting that with the COVID-19 pandemic (and hopefully longer-term changes in scientific conferences to promote the participation of diverse members in online events and reduce carbon emissions), attending events no longer automatically means travelling in person.

BOSC is organized entirely by volunteers. We are lucky to have these amazing people on the Organizing Committee this year!

Jason Williams( @JasonWilliamsNY) is a new member of the BOSC Organizing Committee, though he’s been a BOSC participant and an abstract reviewer for years. Jason was a BOSC panelist in 2015 on a panel about increasing diversity in open source bioinformatics, and again in 2018 for a panel about training and documentation in open source bioinformatics.

Are you thinking of writing an abstract for BOSC? We’re here to help! The BOSC Organizing Committee is holding two “abstract parties” that will be fun collaborative work sessions. We’ll start by giving some tips for writing a great BOSC abstract, and then open the floor to questions and “workshopping”: show us your in-progress abstract, and we’ll give you helpful suggestions. Or you can just attend and work on your abstract in silent solidarity with others!

BOSC 2021 will take place July 29-30, as part of ISMB/ECCB 2021 Online.

Key Dates

May 6, 2021 (11:59pm EDT): Deadline for submitting one-page talk/poster abstracts May 27: Talk/poster acceptance notifications June 3: Late poster (and Late-Breaking Lightning Talk) submission deadline June 10: Late poster / LBLT acceptance notifications July 29-30: BOSC 2021 Online (part of ISMB/ECCB 2021 Online) July 31-Aug 1: CollaborationFest (CoFest)

About BOSC 2021

BOSC is returning to ISMB in 2021, after a successful partnership with Galaxy for the first Bioinformatics Community Conference last year (BCC2020 online). Originally slated to take place in Lyon, France, ISMB/ECCB 2021 will be held online, and features over a dozen tracks, including BOSC. As usual, BOSC will include keynote talks, longer and shorter (lightning) talks from submitted abstracts, posters, Birds of a Feather, and more!

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2021, round 1 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 2021. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form.

We invite applications from candidates who are seeking financial support to attend or host virtual events in 2021. The selected awardees can use the OBF Event Fellowship to cover conference registration fees and potentially additional expenses associated with attending or hosting the event, such as small hardware (microphone, speaker, webcam), childcare for the duration of the event and high-speed internet. Like last year, in this round, we will consider applications to attend or host virtual events only. This decision has been made due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic induced lockdown and restricted travels. Expenses that will be incurred by remote participation have to be justified in the application and will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

TL;DR: Nominate candidates or yourself for the OBF board via this form or work with OBF in other volunteer capacities.

Nominations are welcome for the OBF Board election

OBF is committed to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community. The roles and functions of OBF have evolved over the last 20 years, and currently include:

- hosting and sponsoring the annual events, Bioinformatics Open Source Conference
- running open source events like CodeFests and Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
- offering Event fellowships to promote diversity of underrepresented community members at open source events
- onboarding and supporting OBF member projects by providing financial management support (e.g., reimbursements and payments and advertising)
- maintaining OBF website, social media and newsletter for information dissemination
- advocating through policy and public statements

It’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) application time again - I’ll be leading the OBF GSoC application and org admin process this year alongside Sarthak Sehgal, Michael Crusoe, and Kai Blin. The OBF typically works as an umbrella organisation for other sub-projects - if you have an open + bio related code project that you think could use a student intern this year, please read on.

TL;DR: Please send ideas for half-sized projects (1.5 months, not 3 months) by Thursday 18 feb, New mailing list, Code of Conduct.

About three years ago I nervously responded to a blog post from the OBF looking for board member applications from people who were interested in leading open science related initiatives. This went as well as I possibly could have hoped - both myself and the other applicant, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, officially joined the board in March of 2018 for a three-year term.

Over the last (nearly) three years, I’ve learned a lot and have participated in many OBF activities I can be proud of. We launched a new community-designed OBF logo (special thanks to Aleix Lafita-Masip and all the others who contributed!), I mentored the fabulous Deepashree Deshmukh, an Outreachy intern, to migrate the OBF website from its old mediawiki-based format onto a shiny new Wordpress site, I joined the OBF GSoC org admin team alongside Sarthak Sehgal, and we launched an OBF newsletter. We’re still working on preparing an OBF Code of Conduct, which hopefully will be launched soon.

BOSC is returning to ISMB in 2021, after a successful partnership with Galaxy for the first Bioinformatics Community Conference last year ( BCC2020 online). Originally slated to take place in Lyon, France, ISMB/ECCB 2021 announced today that the conference will be virtual. This news may be disappointing to some, but for others it offers an opportunity to participate in a conference that they would not have been able to travel to attend.

The OBF has two sets of domain names available for adoption by a non-profit or open source project: biows.org, biows.com, biows.net and biocpp.org, biocpp.com, biocpp.net

These domains were registered and donated to us with bio-web-services (biows) and bio-c-plus-plus (BioC++ or BioCPP) in mind, but we’ve failed to find a good home for them.

Please note that this is like adopting a free puppy - we’ll transfer them at no cost, but domain names come with annual renewal charges which the recipient organisation would be responsible for paying.