Posts

If you’re going to GCCBOSC 2018, we invite you to join us at the OBF Birds of a Feather on Wednesday, June 27, from 5:40-7:40pm. Come and chat over dinner! Everyone is invited, whether you’re a longtime OBF member or someone who’s never even heard of the OBF. (By the way, anyone who is involved in open source or open science is welcome to join the OBF, and there is no membership fee.) More details at https://gccbosc2018.sched.com/event/FCGp We look forward to seeing some of you there!

We had another great round of applications for the OBF Travel Fellowship this spring. After reviewing the applications, the OBF Board selected three recipients, who have all accepted the award.

Congratulations to our spring 2018 recipients:

• Anisha Keshavan –  attended the eLife Innovation Sprint. Anisha is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, where she develops open source code, including citizen scientist platforms for image quality classification and image segmentation ( update - see blog post).
• Farah Zaib Khan – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Farah is a Common Workflow Language contributor based at the University of Melbourne. She has recently been working on a project to record the provenance of CWL workflows, and first attended BOSC in 2017 ( update - see blog post).
• Tendai Mutangadura – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Tendai is a first-time BOSC attendee who works at the University of Missouri and focuses on studying disease-causing mutations in canine genomics ( update - see blog post).

Watch this space for blog posts from each of the awardees ( update - links added above).

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is again participating in the Google Summer of Code program this year. Last Monday the selected students were announced. Congratulations to all of you, and a heartfelt welcome. I also want to use this opportunity to thank all students who applied. Resources were limited, we did not get all the slots that we asked for, and so we had to make some tough choices.  We wish you all the best for your future endeavours, and hope to be able to work with you in future. The field of bioinformatics is a small one, as you will find out.

BioJava 5.0.0 was released on the 23rd of March 2018. This represents a major milestone that brings more consolidation and reorganisation of modules. This is the first release to be based on Java 8, bring in your lambdas and stream API calls!

The release represents work done in the last 2 years, alpha releases were available for quite some time and now this makes all the changes officially public.

Some major refactoring occurred in the biojava-structure module. The data model to deal with macromolecular structures has been adapted to be closer to the mmCIF data model. Other improvements in biojava-structure are support for MMTF format and improved symmetry detection code.

Dear Biopythoneers,

Source distributions of Biopython 1.71 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI) including pre-compiled Wheel Packages for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6 (we have now dropped support for Python 3.3). It has also been tested on PyPy2.7 v5.10.0 and PyPy3.5 v5.10.1.

Python 3 is the primary development platform for Biopython. We will drop support for Python 2.7 no later than 2020, in line with the end-of-life or sunset date for Python 2.7 itself.

As mentioned in our previous blog post, last Friday the OBF had a board of directors meeting. One of the notable meeting items this time was to elect more board members to help be involved with the community. We’re pleased to announce that both candidates, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi, were unanimously voted in by the other board members!Logically, one of their first moves as newly minted members was to draft this blog post! Some of the their possible ideas for the future include:

Dial-in information

• Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939
• PIN: 62534
• http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

Agenda

Venue: To be held by conference call on March 16, 2018, 11.00am EDT (15:00 UTC, 16:00 CET, 8.00am PDT). Note that at the time of the meeting, the US will have switched already to DST, whereas Europe will not, so the time zone difference is an hour less than it would normally be.
Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

1. Old business
   • Oct 2016 BoD meeting minutes
2. New business
   1. Term expirations and Elections for the Board ( electronic ballot)
      • Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, running for Board member at-large
      • Yo Yehudi, running for Board member at-large
   2. Fiscal sponsor - experiences, lessons, possibilities

Minutes

Attending:

The OBF Board of Directors holds a public meeting about once a year, in accordance with our bylaws. The next such meeting will take place on March 16, 2018, at 15:00 UTC (11am EDT / 8am PDT / 16:00 CET). The meeting agenda can be found at /wiki/Minutes:2018_Mar_ConfCall.

At this public Board meeting, we will consider two new candidates running for Board seats: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi. Both are known for their promotional and organizational involvement in open science, open data and open source bioinformatics.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the 2018 instance of the Google Summer of Code. OBF is acting as an umbrella for ten bioinformatics Open Source projects, making it possible to offer a very diverse set of student projects.

Are you a student and interested in applying for any of the projects? The student application period is open from March 12th through 27th from the official GSoC website. See the full timeline for details. Feel free to contact the mentors of projects you are interested in already, though.