Community

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

This blog post is syndicated from a post on Arun Decano’s blog, originally published Feb 1, 2018. Arun was supported by the ongoing OBF travel fellowship program to attend a Galaxy Admin Workshop held in Oslo, Norway Jan 7-14, 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences, workshops, or training events. The next call closes 15 April 2018. [Read More]

The OBF’s self-hosted mailman server is still struggling right now, so we are looking at migrating the active mailing lists to paid hosting, and as part of this consolidating down to ideally about a dozen mailing lists. Currently we have a lot of mailing lists, but many are dormant or redundant. [Read More]

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program was launched in 2016 to help increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. There are four application deadlines per year; the next will be December 15, 2017. If you are hoping to attend an open source / open science bioinformatics even and travel costs are a barrier, we encourage you to apply for one of our $1000 travel fellowships. [Read More]

This is a guest blog post from Farah Zaib Khan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend our annual conference BOSC 2017 and its preceding Codefest in Prague, July 2017. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. The current call closes 15 December 2017, you might want to apply? [Read More]

TL;DR: The OBF isn’t doing enough in public policy and advocacy around Open Science, and we are looking to recruit a new board member who is interested in this role. Is that you? If yes, then contact us. At our October meeting, the OBF board took some time to think broadly about the OBF, current and future. We tried to answer the questions: What do we say we do? What do we actually do? [Read More]

This time of year we’d normally be having a public board meeting as part of our commitment to communication with our member projects and the wider OBF community. As per our bylaws we notify the community at least 10 days in advance, and we’d also handle election of new board members and leadership changes where appropriate. For a couple of reasons, we’re going to postpone that until early 2018. Our mailing list server (which hosts many of our member project lists) has been overwhelmed in the past few days, leading to delayed or blocked communication not just to our members but for our member projects who rely on it. [Read More]

Podcast.__init__ describes itself as “The Podcast About Python and the People Who Make It Great”, and the most recent episode is " Biopython with Peter Cock, Wibowo Arindrarto, and Tiago Antão (Episode 125)". Listening to the finished podcast, interviewer Tobias Macey did a great job. There are things I would have liked to have said - but it turned out pretty well. I hope you’ll agree: Its worth looking back over the podcast archives, here are a few that caught my eye: [Read More]