Bosc

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.

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.

Online. By at least a factor of two.

Our recent article entitled Lessons learnt from organizing a virtual conference discusses some of our technology choices and how we leveraged them to put on a successful online meeting. That article touches briefly on some of the challenges we faced, but it doesn’t fully convey how much work it was–both in advance and during the event.

Before we go any further, who are you? This post was written by Nomi Harris, the long-time (co-)chair of BOSC, and the co-chair (along with Dave Clements) of BCC2020 (the Bioinformatics Community Conference, a collaboration between the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) and the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC)). The perspective expressed in this post is mine alone, and does not necessarily reflect the views of others on the BCC2020 organizing committee. Also, although BCC2020 was an equal partnership between BOSC and GCC and the planning was done jointly (except for abstract reviews), my perspective is naturally BOSC-centric.

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. Edidiong Etuk (Eddie), an open-source lover and a software engineer from Nigeria, was supported to take part in Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2020 by this fellowship granted to him in the application round-1 of 2020. Find more information here.

TL;DR This post is about my experience at Bioinformatics Community Conference 2020.

BCC2020 (the collaborative BOSC + GCC meeting) was held online, with over 800 people registered for some part of the meeting. We used Remo.co as the technology platform, along with Discord for chat. Read about why we chose those, how it worked out, and our tips for others who are organizing virtual conferences here.

“Table view” in Remo during BCC2020

After much discussion, the BCC2020 organizing committee has decided to hold the meeting on Remo.co, which is similar to Zoom but offers a more conference-like experience, with “floors” and “tables” where you can mingle with other attendees. It has great small group and presentation support, including for posters and demos. It’s also more fun than most online conference platforms.

Because Remo is not familiar to most BCC participants, we are holding two open houses, one in each hemisphere, the day before BCC training starts. These walk-throughs will introduce participants to Remo’s features and demonstrate how to navigate between sessions, poster/demos, BoFs, training and everything else.

We’re old hands at organizing in-person BOSC s (some of us were involved in planning the very first BOSC, in 2000), but this is the first time we’re attempting an online conference, and we want your help to make BCC2020 a rewarding experience for all.

We know many of you have attended other virtual conferences recently, and we’re interested in hearing what worked well and what didn’t. In particular, we are trying to figure out how to make virtual posters work, and how to run Q&A (with audio, or just typed? live, right after the talks, or asynchronous?). We’re also interested in ideas for adding fun social elements to what could otherwise be a pretty dull extended videoconference.