Board

About three years ago I nervously responded to a blog post from the OBF looking for board member applications from people who were interested in leading open science related initiatives. This went as well as I possibly could have hoped - both myself and the other applicant, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, officially joined the board in March of 2018 for a three-year term.

Over the last (nearly) three years, I’ve learned a lot and have participated in many OBF activities I can be proud of. We launched a new community-designed OBF logo (special thanks to Aleix Lafita-Masip and all the others who contributed!), I mentored the fabulous Deepashree Deshmukh, an Outreachy intern, to migrate the OBF website from its old mediawiki-based format onto a shiny new Wordpress site, I joined the OBF GSoC org admin team alongside Sarthak Sehgal, and we launched an OBF newsletter. We’re still working on preparing an OBF Code of Conduct, which hopefully will be launched soon.

During the public OBF Board Meeting held on December 17, 2019, elections were held for five Board members whose terms were about to expire. All five stood for re-election to the Board, though with some changes of officers:

• Hilmar Lapp: stepped down after 8 years as President of the Board; elected to At-Large seat.
• Peter Cock: elected as President of the Board.
• Heather Wiencko: elected as Treasurer, replacing previous Treasurer Peter Cock.
• Chris Fields: re-elected as Secretary.
• Nomi Harris: re-elected as At-Large Board member.

In accordance with the OBF Bylaws, the newly elected Board members and officers will serve a three-year term.

At the OBF’s July 2019 public Board meeting (held at BOSC 2019), Malvika Sharan was unanimously elected as a new at-large Board member. Malvika, who earned a PhD in bioinformatics at the University of Würzburg, is a community outreach coordinator at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg. She is passionate about promoting the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in bioinformatics and STEM in general. Malvika recently won a fellowship from the Software Sustainability Institute to support her research into identifying and developing effective training strategies in low-income research environments (limited resources, lack of funding, etc.). She was also a recipient of an OBF Travel Fellowship that helped defray her cost of attending BOSC.

As mentioned in our previous blog post, last Friday the OBF had a board of directors meeting. One of the notable meeting items this time was to elect more board members to help be involved with the community. We’re pleased to announce that both candidates, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi, were unanimously voted in by the other board members!Logically, one of their first moves as newly minted members was to draft this blog post! Some of the their possible ideas for the future include:

The OBF Board of Directors holds a public meeting about once a year, in accordance with our bylaws. The next such meeting will take place on March 16, 2018, at 15:00 UTC (11am EDT / 8am PDT / 16:00 CET). The meeting agenda can be found at /wiki/Minutes:2018_Mar_ConfCall.

At this public Board meeting, we will consider two new candidates running for Board seats: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi. Both are known for their promotional and organizational involvement in open science, open data and open source bioinformatics.

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.

The OBF has at least one public board meeting per year, in part to vote on important business issues, and in part to publicly discuss items relevant to the OBF community.  The latest public OBF Board of Director’s meeting took place October 4, 2016. It was attended by Board members Hilmar Lapp, Peter Cock, Nomi Harris, Chris Fields, and Karen Cranston, as well as guests Heather Wiencko (Board candidate), Michael Crusoe, Spencer Bliven, and Robert Gilmore.

The agenda, and tentative minutes (taken by then-secretary Peter Cock) are available from the OBF wiki.  The following is a summary:

The next public Board of Directors Meeting of the OBF will take place on May 12th, 2015, at 17:00 UTC (1pm EDT, 10am PDT, 19:00 CEST, see World Clock). The developing agenda for the meeting is posted, as are the dial-in details.

We will have Board elections at this meeting. The terms of Directors Jason Stajich and Chris Dagdigian expire, and they will both step down from the Board. As most of you will know, both have provided truly extraordinary service to the OBF, from the earliest beginnings of the organization and in fact the very community around it. They provided leadership when few others did, and they were there during the most challenging times of OBF.  If you won’t be able to attend the meeting, please still find the time to express your appreciation to them for their service, and the work they continue to volunteer.

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).

The OBF Conference call is scheduled for 12:30PM to 2PM PST on Wednesday Nov 19, 2008.  Members of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and those interested in the decisions are invited to listen in and participate.  A brief agenda is available here.

Please email Hilmar Lapp at hlapp _AT_ gmx.net for call in number and codes if you wish to participate or listen to the discussion.  Those official members should have gotten an email via the  OBF members email list.