Community

We had a huge response to this round of the OBF travel award. After reviewing the applications, the OBF board selected four recipients. Three applicants accepted awards, and all plan to use the funds to attend this year’s BOSC, to take place July 22-23 in Prague.

Congratulations to our spring 2017 recipients:

• Sourav Singh, who will participate in the Codefest and present the Biopython Project Update 2017 talk
• Jonathan Sobel, presenting on a citizen science project named BeerDeCoded, carried out by members of the Swiss non-profit called the Hackuarium
• Jiwen Xin, presenting the BioThings Explorer project, which integrates genomic data via public APIs

We encourage everyone at BOSC to come out and support our award winners! After BOSC, watch for blog posts from each of the awardees.

We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2017, and our first sponsors.

But first a final reminder - today (Thursday 13 April 2017) is our deadline for submitting a full length talk abstract to BOSC 2017.

Dawn Field

Dawn Field is a Lamberg International Guest Professor at Göteborg University’s Department of Marine Sciences. Previously she was a senior research fellow at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Head of the Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, UK, and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. She is also a founder of the Genomic Standards Consortium, the Genomic Observatories Network and Ocean Sampling Day.

The OBF has at least one public board meeting per year, in part to vote on important business issues, and in part to publicly discuss items relevant to the OBF community.  The latest public OBF Board of Director’s meeting took place October 4, 2016. It was attended by Board members Hilmar Lapp, Peter Cock, Nomi Harris, Chris Fields, and Karen Cranston, as well as guests Heather Wiencko (Board candidate), Michael Crusoe, Spencer Bliven, and Robert Gilmore.

The agenda, and tentative minutes (taken by then-secretary Peter Cock) are available from the OBF wiki.  The following is a summary:

First I would like to congratulate OBF that supports diversity in the community with its travel awards initiative. I was very pleased to be one of the three travel fellowship awardees. Thank you OBF! Ιt was great to attend BOSC 2016 and meet remarkable people and know their work.It was one of the most welcoming meetings I have attended and Ι liked that is was active on the social media and the conference materials and speaker presentations were available online. It made it fun and useful and we could focus less on our notebooks and more on the speakers. Τhis also attracted a lot of positive comments from the other Special Interest Groups. So “Bravo” to the organizers!On the scientific part, it was nice to see Docker making an impression on the bioinformatics community. Everyone was talking about it. It is an awesome way to package bioinformatics applications and the fact that it received so much attention got me pretty excited. I am planning to use it to package CollOS, an open source web application I presented at the conference, that tracks, annotates and barcodes biological samples to facilitate wet lab scientists to locate and identify biological samples.Last but definitely not least, I would like to congratulate Mónica Muñoz-Torres and the organizers for their reference to the recent tragic shooting incident in Orlando.Hope to see you next year in Prague!Dimitra

BioJava is organizing a design competition to come up with a new logo. Anybody can participate:

• The logo should look modern and be better than the current one (yellow circle)

• The logo should be able to be rendered as a favicon, as well as large (e.g. on a t-shirt). Designs that come in two (or multiple) sizes are ok.

• Logos shall not look similar in any way to the trademarked Java programming language logo. This means no coffee cups in any way.

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Every year, BOSC includes a panel discussion that offers attendees the chance to engage in conversation with the panelists and each other. BOSC is all about community, so this year’s panel topic– Growing and Sustaining Open Source Communities–is right at the heart of what we do. Since the first BOSC in 2000, we have focused on bringing together open source bioinformatics developers and users to form and expand collaborations and grow the communities that use and improve their tools and resources.

The first round of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program has granted funds to three open source bioinformatics software developers to help them attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2016 in Orlando, Florida, this July. The travel fellowship program ( announced 1 May 2016) aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Applications for the first round in 2016 were due on April 15, with two more due dates this year on August 15 and December 15.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2016 program, and last Friday the selected students were announced. Congratulations to all of you, and welcome. I also want to use this opportunity to thank all students who applied. Resources are limited and your proposals did not make it easy to select our finalists. 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 after all.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is pleased to announce a gift of USD 18,125 from the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code toward the OBF travel fellowship program. The program, announced earlier this year on March 1, aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. The program includes but is not limited to the annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), OBF’s flagship event.