Community

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. Jemima Becker, DPhil student at Merton College, University of Oxford, attended the EMBO workshop: “Neural stem cells: From basic understanding to translational applications", supported by this fellowship granted to him in the first round of 2022.

This June, I had the opportunity to travel to the EMBO workshop: “Neural stem cells: From basic understanding to translational applications”. There, I presented a poster documenting the first six months of my PhD work on long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the postnatal ventricular-subventricular (V-SVZ): “Long noncoding RNAs in the Ventricular-Subventricular zone: what have we learnt from single cell transcriptomics?”.

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. Furkan M. Torun, Data Scientist at OmicEra Diagnostics & Computational Biologist, attended the PyCon Italia 2022, supported by this fellowship granted to him in the first round of 2022.

Background

As it is shown in the surveys of the programming languages used and the latest publications in the field of bioinformatics/computational biology, Python has experienced unprecedented growth. Meanwhile, to spread knowledge, learn from each other, and make new networks for Pythonistas, several Python conferences (“PyCon”), are held annually by the international communities worldwide.

’ello Co-Fest Friends!

After failing to find a good spot for an in-person CoFest, we decided to have the CoFest remotely! I was really excited to meet you all at this event (and have you all meet each other) in the real world, but we’ll have to settle for doing that at BOSC (for those who are there).

By all means, don’t let this stop your in-person innovations! Want to meet up and work at a café? Do it! Hotel room? It’s your room! Get some of your newest friends together and collaborate!

Guest post by Thomas Schlapp, CoFest organizer

This year we’re looking to have another post-BOSC CoFest! Last year (my first year being involved in BOSC at all) showed me just how collaborative and innovative this community can be. I’d absolutely LOVE to see more of it again. Last year we saw six very fascinating projects see progress (look them over HERE!). Let’s see if we cannot do just a few more in the name of innovation and collaboration!

We are excited to announce that BOSC and Bio-Ontologies will join forces for part of a day at ISMB 2022. The joint session will include talks chosen from abstracts submitted to BOSC or Bio-Ontologies, plus a keynote speaker who is well known in both the ontology and open science communities!

BOSC and Bio-Ontologies are two of the longest-running COSIs (Communities of Special Interest) at ISMB: BOSC started in 2000 and Bio-Ontologies in 1998. Bio-Ontologies focuses on the FAIR development and application of ontologies and other Linked Open Data resources and the organization and dissemination of knowledge in biomedicine and the life sciences; BOSC covers the full spectrum of open source, open science, open data and open standards in the life sciences.

Yesterday we hosted the OBF/BOSC contribution to the ISCBacademy webinar. Our former OBF-board member and Open Life Science co-lead Yo Yehudi presented how internship programs such as Google Summer of Code or Outreachy can be a great way to grow your open source community. If you missed the event, you can now watch the recording on YouTube.

Lalit Narayan, who is an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, was a first-time webinar attendee:

Announcement drafted by Malvika Sharan, Caleb Kibet and Hilya Zahroh, with the OBF Board’s input.

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2022, round 1 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 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 scientific events in 2022. These events can be conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. 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. Please read details about what this fellowship award will and will not cover. For instance, group applications are not in scope, but if multiple members of the same group would like to attend the same event, each member should send their application separately. If members of an organising committee would like to apply for support for hosting an event, the application should be sent by one person (preferably the lead organiser). More details regarding the fellowship application, review, and reimbursement process can be found on our website: /event-awards/.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to support and encourage diverse participation at events focusing on open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Each year we open two calls for applications, deadlines for which are 1 April and 1 October.

In 2021, we received 15 applications, of which three applicants, Sona Charles (Indian Institute of Spices Research, India), Anshika Sah (Institute of Home Economics, India) and Rupesh Gelal (Nepal Engineering College, Nepal) were awarded funding across the two open calls.

We are delighted to announce that Caleb Kibet and Hilyatuz Zahroh, two members who recently joined the OBF board, will be joining Malvika Sharan as the co-chairs of the OBF Event Fellowship program. Inviting contributions from the OBF board members, as well as bringing insights from their lived experiences, Caleb, Hilya and Malvika will re-evaluate how we can manage the OBF Event fellowship more effectively going forward.

There is a growing body of evidence, including the report from BOSC 2021, that virtual events are indeed more equitable for our colleagues from the Global South (see references: [1] & [2]), who were inadvertently excluded from most international events which required expensive travelling before the pandemic. However, in 2021, we saw a decline in applications to the Event Fellowship where we specifically accepted applications requesting funding for online conferences. We suspected that, after a year of the pandemic, most people working remotely must have managed the basic setup to attend virtual events.  It is also possible that many potential applicants might consider the expense for participation trivial enough that they didn’t want to spend time writing proposals or dealing with the admin workload of requesting fee assistance, and instead pay it out of their own pockets. Furthermore, online events are often free and/or provide free recordings to watch after the event – removing the need to pay a registration fee.

As previously described, during the November 2021 public Board meeting, the OBF announced two new initiatives to be voted on by the OBF membership. Both of these received a large majority of votes:

1. OBF Community Support Sponsorship (53 for, 3 against, 2 abstaining)
2. OBF Code of Conduct (54 for, 2 against, 1 abstaining)

The work to set up the new Community Support Sponsorship is underway. The new Code of Conduct is now available on the OBF website.