General

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.

The 24th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2023, took place as part of ISMB/ECCB 2023 in Lyon, France, and online. ISMB/ECCB attracted a near-record number of attendees, with over 2100 in person and  about 900 more online.

Most of the BOSC organizing committee (missing: Jessica Maia and Chris Fields)A full room at BOSC 2023

The opening session of BOSC kicked off with a welcome from chair Nomi Harris. An overview of BOSC’s parent organization, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, was presented by OBF Board member Bastian Greshake Tzovaras.

We’re sharing some important news with you regarding our mailing lists. From early on, we’ve maintained a self-hosted Mailman server for any OBF project that needs a mailing list, including our member roster list. After careful consideration, we have decided we need a solution that keeps track more reliably with current and emerging spam-fighting technologies and standards, and that simultaneously requires much less administration time and know-how. Specifically, we are planning to migrate the lists to paid hosting, possibly Mailchimp.

Date, Time, and How to Join

• Date and time: 2022-10-21, 15:00 UTC (8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm UK)

Agenda

Board Officer Elections

• Chris Fields wishes to step down as Secretary, and Nomi Harris is standing for election to this role
• This will be an electronic ballot of the current board members

Elections to the Board

• Iddo Friedberg, running for Board member at-large ( statement of interest)
• This will be an electronic ballot of the current board members

Bylaw Changes

• We periodically review our bylaws
• Changes must formally approved by the Board at a public board meeting
• We plan minor changes to avoid gendered language, including subsuming the Secretary role (with historical gendered associations) into a Vice President role.
• Proposed changes expressed as a Pull Request

Minutes

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

The following outlines a potential new grant programme, subject to approval by the OBF membership in a formal vote, which the OBF board would hope to launch this year.

Motivation

In 2016, the OBF introduced a “Travel Fellowship” to help individuals attend meetings, aiming to improve diversity in the bioinformatics community. Awardees were reimbursed (with receipts) after the event in which they participated, with a standard cap of USD $1000. The Travel Fellowship was later renamed the “Event Fellowship” reflecting that with the COVID-19 pandemic (and hopefully longer-term changes in scientific conferences to promote the participation of diverse members in online events and reduce carbon emissions), attending events no longer automatically means travelling in person.

TL;DR: Nominate candidates or yourself for the OBF board via this form or work with OBF in other volunteer capacities.

Nominations are welcome for the OBF Board election

OBF is committed to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community. The roles and functions of OBF have evolved over the last 20 years, and currently include:

- hosting and sponsoring the annual events, Bioinformatics Open Source Conference
- running open source events like CodeFests and Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
- offering Event fellowships to promote diversity of underrepresented community members at open source events
- onboarding and supporting OBF member projects by providing financial management support (e.g., reimbursements and payments and advertising)
- maintaining OBF website, social media and newsletter for information dissemination
- advocating through policy and public statements

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). The goal was an attractive and easily-updatable site that can function as a community-oriented hub. Did we accomplish that? Your feedback on the new site is welcome!

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program was launched in 2016 to help increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. There are four application deadlines per year; the next will be December 15, 2017. 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. More information, including a link to the application form, can be found at https://github.com/OBF/obf-docs/blob/master/Travel_fellowships.md.

TL;DR: The OBF isn’t doing enough in public policy and advocacy around Open Science, and we are looking to recruit a new board member who is interested in this role. Is that you? If yes, then contact us.

At our October meeting, the OBF board took some time to think broadly about the OBF, current and future. We tried to answer the questions: What do we say we do? What do we actually do? What more do we wish we could do? We re-read our mission statement and list of public activities from the OBF main page, listed the current efforts of the board members and affiliates, and assessed how our actual work aligned with the stated goals of the organization. This was motivated by having board members who are new-ish to the OBF, as well as upcoming board elections.

This time of year we’d normally be having a public board meeting as part of our commitment to communication with our member projects and the wider OBF community. As per our bylaws we notify the community at least 10 days in advance, and we’d also handle election of new board members and leadership changes where appropriate. For a couple of reasons, we’re going to postpone that until early 2018.

Our mailing list server (which hosts many of our member project lists) has been overwhelmed in the past few days, leading to delayed or blocked communication not just to our members but for our member projects who rely on it. We’re looking into options for solving this problem, which might include migrating to a hosted solution.