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!

About a year ago, the OBF shared plans to get more involved with the open science community, and followed up by recruiting two board members for this purpose. Since then, we’ve tried to keep up momentum and community engagement - during GCCBOSC, we held an OBF Birds of Feather meeting, allowing members of the board to meet with attendees and discuss their needs and interests. As a result of this meeting, we ended up with our new community-designed logo and launched a community newsletter (incidentally, issue 2 of the newsletter is going to be released within the next few days - feel free to suggest a news item).

We have successfully crowd-sourced a new OBF logo! The process started at the OBF Birds of a Feather meeting at GCCBOSC 2018 when the OBF leaders announced that we were seeking a new logo design. Two BoF participants immediately started sketching ideas, as well as a third community member who was not at the BoF but saw our tweet. The designs (which you can see here) were put up for a public vote. Aleix Lafita’s narrowly won and was adopted as our new OBF logo! We are currently working on possible variations on the logo for special events or causes (for example, a rainbow version).

BioJava is organizing a design competition to come up with a new logo. Anybody can participate:

• The logo should look modern and be better than the current one (yellow circle)

• The logo should be able to be rendered as a favicon, as well as large (e.g. on a t-shirt). Designs that come in two (or multiple) sizes are ok.

• Logos shall not look similar in any way to the trademarked Java programming language logo. This means no coffee cups in any way.

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The first round of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program has granted funds to three open source bioinformatics software developers to help them attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2016 in Orlando, Florida, this July. The travel fellowship program ( announced 1 May 2016) aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Applications for the first round in 2016 were due on April 15, with two more due dates this year on August 15 and December 15.

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.

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).