Community

We invited our community to nominate potential keynote speakers for BOSC, and we were delighted with the many excellent suggestions received. In the next stage of this process, we’re providing you with an opportunity to express any concerns regarding the suitability of any nominated individuals as BOSC Keynote Speakers.

Our invited speaker selection process and criteria include examples of potential reasons for exclusion. If you have concerns about any of the individuals on our list, please share them (with as much detail as you feel comfortable providing) through this anonymous form by Friday, January 24, 2025.

The call for applications for round 3 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2024 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 December 2024. You can submit your application through this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out 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 seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events between January and December 2025. These events include 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 call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2024, round 2, is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 August 2024. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out 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 seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events from September 2024 to March 2025. These events include 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 call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2024, round 1, is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 2024. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out 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 seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events from May 2024 to December 2024. These events include 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 our community to nominate potential BOSC keynote speakers, and we were pleased with the great suggestions! In the next phase of our process, we’re giving you 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 Thursday 2024-01-25.

We are seeking a diverse list of potential BOSC keynote speakers. We invite you, our community, to nominate people you think would be appropriate (and at least somewhat likely to accept the invitation – for example, it is extremely unlikely that we would get a ‘yes’ from a recent Nobel Laureate). Please submit your nominations here (as many as you like; you can fill out the form more than once to submit additional suggestions) by the end of the day on Wednesday 2024-01-17.

All are invited to join us (via Zoom) at the OBF’s upcoming public Board meeting.

Date, Time, and How to Join

• Date and time: 2023-12-19, 16:00 UTC (8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm UK)

Agenda

Approve October 2022 Public Board Meeting minutes

Review and approve minor changes to bylaws

• Remove one instance of gendered language, replacing “her” with “their”
• Change title of “Secretary” of Board to “Vice President” (with duties unchanged)

Elections to the Board

• Three Board members are up for re-election: Peter Cock (President), Heather Wiencko (Treasurer), and Hilmar Lapp (Member at Large)
• This will be an electronic ballot of the current board members

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

As of November 21, 2023, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and BOSC will no longer post on Twitter/X. Although in the past it was a useful social medium, it is no longer compatible with our values, as expressed in the OBF Code of Conduct:

CollaborationFest, CoFest for short, is a collaborative work event that has been held each of the past 13 years as a satellite event of BOSC. At these free events, held right before or after BOSC, participants  gather in small groups to exchange ideas and work together on projects including but not limited to hacking. Participants were encouraged to submit their project ideas in advance to facilitate collaboration.

CoFest 2023 took place during the two days just before BOSC, which was part of ISMB/ECCB 2023 in Lyon and online. It was the first in-person edition after several online-only CoFests, due to Covid pandemics. It was hosted by Jérémy Just at the nearby École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, which provided space and infrastructure, with funding from Complex Systems Institute for lunches and coffee breaks. Free virtual machines were made available by the French Institute for Bioinformatics and the Pôle scientifique de modélisation numérique.

Sierra Moxon to speak about “LinkML: an open data modeling framework, grounded with ontologies”

[If you missed the webinar, the video is here and the slides are here.]

ISCBacademy is a series of free webinars sponsored by the International Society for Computational Biology. They are open to all, including those who are not ISCB members. ISCB members can access the webinars via the ISCB Nucleus platform: https://iscb.junolive.co/. Non-members need to register for Nucleus: https://iscb.swoogo.com/ISCBnucleus-registration