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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. Michael Thompson’s participation at the Galaxy Admin Training 2020 workshop in Barcelona was supported by this fellowship. Find more information here.

I had the opportunity to visit the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (B.S.C) in Spain from 2nd - 6th March 2020 to participate in the Galaxy Admin Training 2020, organized by Galaxy Europe and in partnership with B.S.C, Elixir, and de.NBI.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation was shocked and saddened to learn that our colleague and collaborator James Taylor, a professor of biology and computer science at Johns Hopkins University, died on April 2, 2020. James was one of the creators and PIs of the Galaxy Project, which is among the most widely used platforms in open bioinformatics. The Galaxy community has created a tribute page for James.

We have close ties to James and the Galaxy project via our flagship conference. BOSC, which was first held in partnership with the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) in 2018, will again be co-hosted with GCC at the online Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020) this July.

The 2020 Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020), which brings together the BOSC and Galaxy communities, will take place online–more info here.

The online meeting will still be held July 18-21. Registration will open in a few weeks, and fees will be lower than for an in-person meeting. Abstract submission will open soon and will close April 30th. We will follow the usual submission and review processes.

We are discussing how to arrange the schedule to allow for participation across the globe. We welcome your input on how to make our first Virtual Bioinformatics Community Conference a success.

We are currently accepting applications for the first application round for the OBF Travel Fellowship 2020. This fellowship aims to promote the conference/event participation of attendees who advocate and present their work related to open-source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. In 2019, a total of 9 applicants received OBF travel fellowships to attend various conferences across the globe to present their work, gain new skills and promote Open Science practices in their respective areas of life science.

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. Arunav Konwar’s participation at Global Community Biosummit (GCBS), 2019 was supported by this fellowship. Find more information here.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Global Community Biosummit (GCBS), which took place between October 11-13 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, USA.

The call for OBF travel fellowship to select the next round of awardees is officially open! Please submit your application by filling out this form. Deadline for this round is 1 December 2019.

This fellowship aims to support our community members in attending events that promote open source software development and/or open science in the biological research fields. As the organiser of Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) since 2000, OBF understands the role of such conferences and wants to support people who can benefit from showcasing their work, learn from each other and promote open science at BOSC or similar events.

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.

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. He will give a talk and lead a workshop at the Global Community Bio Summit 3.0, which aims to democratize biotechnology by building an inclusive global network of people in the life sciences.

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!) at the workplace or other formal situations. Such unplanned encounters lead to genuine connections between people resulting in meaningful and productive collaborations. Many research organizations value the importance of such serendipitous interactions, and actively promote them in their work-culture. Conference organizers also recognize its effectiveness and design their program with longer coffee breaks, dedicated slots for informal discussions and designated venues for breakout sessions.

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.