Community

The OBF Community Support Sponsorship scheme aims to sponsor small open-source-focused events like a scientific meeting, small conference, training workshop, hackathon, or time-limited series like monthly seminars. See details in this post. One application was funded under this program to prototype the workflow, with OBF offering financial support for a seminar series hosted by the Bioinformatics Hub Kenya. Congratulations to Michael Kofia Landi for leading this application and working collaboratively with the BHKi team – Pauline Karega, David Kiragu, Margaret Wanjiku and Festus Nyasimi – and OBF Board including Treasurer Heather Wiencko, to help establish a process for this new type of OBF funding.

Going home after attending BOSC was a little bittersweet. It’s my favorite conference because it brings together such a welcoming group of people, and the lineup of talks typically offers a great balance of technical learning and community-building insights. So on my flight home, I was coasting on dopamine from the good times, but also getting a little sad that it was over for this year. With the help of a few fellow BOSC enthusiasts (special shout-out to Nomi Harris for the event summary notes, photos and help recruiting contributors), I put together this little recap of the conference, with highlights and personal accounts contributed by a number of other participants. I couldn’t fit everything people shared into the blog post, but you can find the full quotes in the original google doc.

Yesterday we hosted the OBF/BOSC contribution to the ISCBacademy webinar. Our former OBF-board member and Open Life Science co-lead Yo Yehudi presented how internship programs such as Google Summer of Code or Outreachy can be a great way to grow your open source community. If you missed the event, you can now watch the recording on YouTube.

Lalit Narayan, who is an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, was a first-time webinar attendee:

Date & Time: Tuesday, February 22, 2022, 15:00 UTC / 11am EDT

Location: online webinar hosted by ISCB

Speaker: Yo Yehudi, Open Life Science (former OBF board member and Google Summer of Code admin & mentor)

Topic: Growing open source communities with internships

The ISCB, which runs the annual ISMB conference, is offering a series of ISCBacademy webinars hosted by the Communities of Special Interest (COSIs), which include BOSC/OBF. These webinars are free to ISCB members.

During our last public Board meeting, the OBF announced two new initiatives that are being proposed for approval by the OBF membership in a formal votes.

1. OBF Community Support Sponsorship: a proposed new grant programme, based on the OBF Event Fellowships but aimed at supporting grassroots projects running events in their own communities. For details see: - /2021/05/11/obf-community-support-sponsorship/ - https://github.com/OBF/obf-docs/issues/86

2. Code of Conduct: BOSC has a code of conduct, as part of the parent conference, but OBF does not yet have its own code of conduct. This pull request lays out a Code of Conduct for the OBF that, if approved by a membership vote, will replace the content on /code-of-conduct/. For details see: - https://github.com/OBF/obf-docs/pull/78

Among the core values shared across the OBF community are inclusiveness and welcoming newcomers to contribute, without discrimination. Every year at BOSC, when we ask who is at BOSC for the first time, about half of the audience’s hands go up. To signify the importance of this, both to existing and prospective community members, BOSC successfully advocated several years ago for ISMB to adopt a Code of Conduct by ISMB (which applies to BOSC when it is held as part of ISMB).

This is a guest blog post from Aziz Khan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the ISMB/ECCB and BOSC 2019 meeting in Basel, July 2019. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Find more information here.

Computational tools and software are now becoming the core of scientific discovery, and making it open source and sharing it freely with the community helps to take scientific discoveries to the next level. We live in an era where international and interdisciplinary collaborations become very central to answer big scientific questions. Given science is becoming more collaborative and data-intensive, we need intelligent and robust computational algorithms to help us to understand and interpret such big-data.

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).

This is a guest blog post from Tendai Mutangadura, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the GCCBOSC 2018 meeting in Portland, June 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. This was one of three awards from our April 2018 travel fellowships call. Our August call recently closed, the current call closes 15 December 2018, you might want to apply?