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Date and Time: Tuesday, March 14, 11am EDT/ 15:00 (not 16:00!) UTC
Location: Online webinar hosted by ISCB and free to the public. (Video now available at https://youtu.be/M2vAotWKd_Q) 
Speaker: Hannah Wei, co-founder and technologist at the Patient-Led Research Collaborative
Topic: Re-Thinking the Patient’s Role in a Learning Health System: Lessons from the Patient-Led Research Collaborative

The ISCB, which runs the annual ISMB conference, is offering a series of ISCBacademy webinars hosted by the Communities of Special Interest (COSIs), which include BOSC/OBF. These webinars are now open to the public; you’ll just need to create an ISCB Nucleus account to register for the webinar.

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The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2023, round 1, is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 2023. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling the form – make a copy of this template.The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events that promote open source bioinformatics and/or open science. We invite applications from candidates who are seeking financial support to attend or host relevant scientific events from May 2023 to April 2024. These events can be conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

We asked the community to nominate potential BOSC keynote speakers, and we were pleased with all the great suggestions! Now it’s time for the next phase of our process: we’re giving the community a chance to let us know if there is anything that makes any of the nominated individuals NOT appropriate as BOSC keynote speakers.

Our invited speaker process and rubric gives examples of some possible reasons for exclusion. If you have concerns about any of the people on our list, please let us know (with as much specificity as you feel comfortable providing) via this anonymous form no later than February 16, 2023.

BOSC usually includes two or three keynotes. We want these invited speakers to be prominent individuals or emerging leaders who are accomplished in their fields, and whose work is likely to be informative and of interest to the bioinformatics open source community. Please see our invited speaker rubric for more information about our keynote speaker selection process and criteria.

We would like to assemble a diverse list of potential BOSC 2023 keynote speakers. We invite the community to nominate keynote speakers using this form by February 9.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Luise Rauer, a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to participate virtually in the 9th International Human Microbiome Consortium (IHMC) conference in November 2022.

What do a total lunar eclipse and the 9th International Human Microbiome Consortium (IHMC) conference have in common? While they are both exciting and rare events that started in Kobe, Japan, on 8th November 2022, they also happened in the very early morning for any spectator from Europe. With the IHMC conference starting at 1 a.m. for me as a virtual participant based in Central Europe, my very unique preparation for this conference included changing my sleeping rhythm to become a nighthawk for 3 days and nights. But it was worth it!

Date, Time, and How to Join

• Date and time: 2022-10-21, 15:00 UTC (8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm UK)

Agenda

Board Officer Elections

• Chris Fields wishes to step down as Secretary, and Nomi Harris is standing for election to this role
• This will be an electronic ballot of the current board members

Elections to the Board

• Iddo Friedberg, running for Board member at-large ( statement of interest)
• This will be an electronic ballot of the current board members

Bylaw Changes

• We periodically review our bylaws
• Changes must formally approved by the Board at a public board meeting
• We plan minor changes to avoid gendered language, including subsuming the Secretary role (with historical gendered associations) into a Vice President role.
• Proposed changes expressed as a Pull Request

Minutes

After the meeting, the meeting minutes will be made available in the obf-docs GitHub repository.

The OBF Community Support Sponsorship scheme aims to sponsor small open-source-focused events like a scientific meeting, small conference, training workshop, hackathon, or time-limited series like monthly seminars. See details in this post. One application was funded under this program to prototype the workflow, with OBF offering financial support for a seminar series hosted by the Bioinformatics Hub Kenya. Congratulations to Michael Kofia Landi for leading this application and working collaboratively with the BHKi team – Pauline Karega, David Kiragu, Margaret Wanjiku and Festus Nyasimi – and OBF Board including Treasurer Heather Wiencko, to help establish a process for this new type of OBF funding.

Going home after attending BOSC was a little bittersweet. It’s my favorite conference because it brings together such a welcoming group of people, and the lineup of talks typically offers a great balance of technical learning and community-building insights. So on my flight home, I was coasting on dopamine from the good times, but also getting a little sad that it was over for this year. With the help of a few fellow BOSC enthusiasts (special shout-out to Nomi Harris for the event summary notes, photos and help recruiting contributors), I put together this little recap of the conference, with highlights and personal accounts contributed by a number of other participants. I couldn’t fit everything people shared into the blog post, but you can find the full quotes in the original google doc.

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2022, round 2 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 October 2022. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling the form – make a copy of this template.

We invite applications from candidates who are seeking financial support to attend or host relevant scientific events from late October 2022 to April 2023. These events can be conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Festus Nyasimi, A co-founder and lead of the Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya Initiative (BHKi), attended the ISMB/BOSC conference 2022, supported by this fellowship granted to him in the first round of 2022.

In mid-May, I attended a different conference where I shared my experience with community building in the bioinformatics space with one of the attendees. I had a chance to brief them about the BHKI community we are building and growing in Africa. Immediately they suggested I should check out the ISMB/BOSC conference happening on July 11th - 14th, 2022.