Podcast.__init__ describes itself as “The Podcast About Python and the People Who Make It Great”, and the most recent episode is " Biopython with Peter Cock, Wibowo Arindrarto, and Tiago Antão (Episode 125)".

Listening to the finished podcast, interviewer Tobias Macey did a great job. There are things I would have liked to have said - but it turned out pretty well. I hope you’ll agree:

Its worth looking back over the podcast archives, here are a few that caught my eye:

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is a two day meeting focused on open source bioinformatics. We aim to encourage and support a friendly, open and productive community that helps us work together to answer hard biological questions. We’ll get together this summer, July 8-9, in Orlando, Florida.

Abstracts for BOSC 2016 talks and posters are due this Friday, April 1st. We want to hear about your research and encourage everyone to submit an abstract. We love talks from newcomers to BOSC as well as established projects: no idea is too big or small. We also offer Travel Fellowships for speakers if money would be a barrier to attending.

We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2016:

Jennifer Gardy

Dr. Jennifer Gardy is both a scientist and science communicator. She holds a PhD in Bioinformatics, and is an Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and a Senior Scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). At the BCCDC, she pioneered a new way of investigating outbreaks of infectious diseases – “genomic epidemiology”, which uses a pathogen’s genome sequence as a tool for understanding how an infectious disease spreads. Her group was the first to use genome sequencing to reconstruct a large outbreak of tuberculosis, and she is continuing to apply this novel technique to other outbreak scenarios. She is also involved in other genomics-related research, including replacing traditional laboratory microbiology protocols with single genomic analyses. In 2014, she was appointed the Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics, and is Senior Editor at the new open data, open access journal Microbial Genomics.

Announcing the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2015:

Holly Bik

Dr Holly Bik is a Birmingham Fellow (assistant professor) in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. She obtained her Ph.D. in molecular phylogenetics at the University of Southampton, UK (working in conjunction with the Natural History Museum, London), followed by subsequent postdoctoral appointments at the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies at the University of New Hampshire and the UC Davis Genome Center.

Call for Abstracts for the 16th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2015), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB/ECCB 2015.

• Dates: 10-11 July, 2015
• Location: Dublin, Ireland
• Web site: /wiki/BOSC_2015
• Email: bosc@open-bio.org
• BOSC announcements mailing list
• Twitter: @OBF_BOSC and @OBF_News

Important Dates:

• March 24, 2015: Registration opens for ISMB and BOSC ( https://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2015-registration)
• April 3, 2015: Deadline for submitting BOSC abstracts
• May 3, 2015: Notification of accepted talk abstracts emailed to authors
• July 8-9, 2015: BOSC Codefest 2015, Dublin
• July 10-11, 2015: BOSC 2015, Dublin
• July 10-14, 2015: ISMB/ECCB 2015, Dublin

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) covers the wide range of open source bioinformatics software being developed, and encompasses the growing movement of Open Science, with its focus on transparency, reproducibility, and data provenance. We welcome submissions relating to all aspects of bioinformatics and open science software, including new computational methods, reusable software components, visualization, interoperability, and other approaches that help to advance research in the biomolecular sciences. We particularly wish to invite those who have not participated in previous BOSCs to join us this year!

Last year’s Google Summer of Code 2014 was very productive for the OBF with six students working on Bio* and related bioinformatics projects. We applied to be part of GSoC 2015, but unfortunately this year were not accepted.

Google’s program is enormously popular, and over-subscribed, meaning Google has had to rotate organisation membership. The OBF is grateful to have been accepted in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. This year any participation will be down to individual projects to find a willing umbrella group from the organisations accepted for GSoC 2015. For example, a Biopython project was included under NESCent for GSoC 2013.

Bioinformatics Open Source Codefest, July 9 and 10th in Boston, now with sponsored food and drinks!

The OBF will be holding the fifth annual BOSC Codefest, an informal two day “hackathon” or “coding festival” preceding the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2014) in Boston (USA).

This year, the BOSC Codefest 2014 is being hosted by hack/reduce (a wonderful hackerspace in Cambridge, Boston) and has also been kindly sponsored by Curoverse (the team behind the open source platform Arvados) and Harbinger Partners, Inc. Thanks to this sponsorship, this year the organisers will able to include catering for the participants - I’m expecting at least coffee and pizza, plus what ever caffeine rich drinks or local pastries are in fashion with the Boston programmers? I checked on wikipedia and Jolt Cola doesn’t exist in the USA any more… so I’m waiting to see what our local organisers Brad Chapman & Michael Heuer have planned.

Thanks to those who participated in the BOSC 2014 Keynote Competition! Our winner is Manuel Corpas, who correctly surmised Philip Bourne:

https://twitter.com/manuelcorpas/status/412520369044463616

(In fact, we had already confirmed Philip Bourne as our second keynote speaker before his new job at NIH was announced.) Congratulations, Manuel, on winning free admission to BOSC 2014!

Dr. Bourne’s keynote talk will be entitled “Biomedical Research as an Open Digital Enterprise”:

The biomedical research lifecycle is fast becoming completely digital and increasingly open to the point that publishing could simply become changing the access control on given research objects comprising ideas, hypotheses, data, software, results, conclusions, reviews, grants and so on. This offers immense opportunities for software developers to enable the enterprise. I will describe a vision for the digital enterprise and what the NIH and others are doing to support the notion with the intent to accelerate scientific discovery.

[Read More]

We’re pleased to officially confirm that one of the two keynote speakers for the 15th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference ( BOSC 2014) will be C. Titus Brown, as he announced on Twitter recently:

Titus Brown (@ctitusbrown):
Excited to be a keynote speaker at BOSC 2014! My title: “A History of Bioinformatics (in the year 2039)” - plenty of room for mischief ;)
https://twitter.com/ctitusbrown/status/410934403565490176

In recognition of the growing use of Twitter and social media within science as a way of connecting across geographical divides, we’re announcing a Twitter competition to guess who is scheduled to give the second keynote at BOSC 2014 in Boston.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) will be holding a public Board of Directors meeting on Tuesday, 13 Nov, 2012, at 11.30am EST (8.30am PST, 17:30 CET, 16:30 UTC/GMT).

The meeting will be held online or over conference call. We will post details about how to dial in or connect closer to the date ( here).

On the agenda Richard Holland and Chris Fields are running for election to the Board, and some other items primarily up for discussion, including how to keep our membership roll up-to-date and increasing with the least barriers. We will post a more detailed agenda in advance of the meeting ( here).