Community

This post is co-authored by Bérénice Batut, Malvika Sharan, Emmy Tsang, and Yo Yehudi. In 2016, Mozilla launched a program to help grow the skills of people interested in working openly and empower a generation of open-inspired leaders. The program has been through several stages of evolution, from early Working Open Workshops, and eventually to regular twice-yearly cohorts, mentoring project leads from all around the globe. Projects spanned a broad number of domains, but included a large number of research/science and tech-oriented projects, including PREreview, an initiative to get people involved in scientific preprint journal clubs; Outbreak science, a nonprofit using technology to support disease outbreaks; MBac, a computer vision tool for bacterial motility assays; and DuraCloud, an open-source digital preservation storage service. [Read More]

A record number of people applied for the latest round of the OBF Travel Fellowship, which closed on August 15, 2019. Out of this great set of applicants, we offered travel awards to three who epitomize the goal of the awards: to promote diversity in the world of open source bioinformatics / open science. The awardees are Arunav Konwar, Fernanda Troyner and Nicolás Palopoli. Arunav has contributed to open source projects including Deep Learning Indaba (an African Machine Learning community), Wikimedia, and Metafluidics. [Read More]

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) sponsors a Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Malvika’s participation at Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2019 was supported by this fellowship granted to her in January 2019. Find more information here. The phrase ‘water cooler effect’ is derived from informal gatherings and connections made around water coolers (or vending machines these days! [Read More]

Thanks to OBF support with a travel grant, I was able to attend the first European CarpentryConnect event in Manchester CCMcr19 organized by The Software Sustainability Institute. Colourful Manchester days post Pride weekend The Carpentries is a global community with a mission to teach essential data and foundational computational skills to researchers for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. The community includes instructors, trainers, maintainers and many more helpers and supporters on a global scale. [Read More]

The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics. Applications are reviewed three times a year. Applicants may apply for attending any event that develops or promotes open source development and open science in the biological research community. It doesn’t have to be an OBF-related event, and it can be one that you already attended in the recent past. For example, if you attended BOSC 2019 and your travel expenses were not covered by your employer or university, you could apply for a travel fellowship to help defray those expenses (up to a maximum of $1000, in most cases). [Read More]

As Europe experienced a record-breaking heat wave, BOSC 2019 attendees stayed cool in the Basel Congress Center (and many took breaks by floating down the Rhine). This was the 20th annual BOSC. In 2018, BOSC partnered with the Galaxy Community Conference in GCCBOSC2018; this year, it returned to ISMB as one of over a dozen “Communities of Special Interest” (COSIs). BOSC 2019 opened on July 24 with chair Nomi Harris noting that over its 20 years, BOSC has been held in 12 different countries, 6 US states and 2 Canadian provinces. [Read More]

Dear Biopythoneers, Biopython 1.74 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7. However, it will be the last release to support Python 3.4 which is now at end-of-life. It has also been tested on PyPy2.7 v6.0.0 and PyPy3.5 v6.0.0. (Please note we will be dropping support for Python 2.7 in early 2020.) Over half our code is now explicitly available under either our original “Biopython License Agreement”, or the very similar but more commonly used “3-Clause BSD License”. [Read More]

We are pleased to announce the April 2019 OBF Travel Fellowship recipients. The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics. After carefully evaluating a competitive set of applications submitted from all around the globe, we were able to extend offers to five deserving applicants: Sara El-Gebali, Angela Wanjugu Muraya, Saket Choudhary, Aziz Khan and Vid Ayer. They have all accepted the award, and we are looking forward to hearing about their experiences. [Read More]

Above: the old BOSC page. Below: the new one. If you’ve been around the OBF and BOSC community, you’re probably familiar with our slightly rusty old site, which ran on MediaWiki, the same open source software that runs Wikipedia. While they’re both awesome tools, we decided it was time for a refresh. Over the last few months, our Outreachy Intern Deepashree Deshmukh designed and implemented the new OBF website(with supervision by OBF Board member Yo Yehudi). [Read More]

This is a guest blog post from Md Kamruzzaman Sarker, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend 2nd U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series (US2TS). 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 on 15 April 2019. 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]