Obf

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

This is a guest blog post from Md Kamruzzaman Sarker, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend 2nd U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series (US2TS). The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. The current call closes on 15 April 2019. 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.

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?

Dear Biopythoneers,

I’m writing this in Portland at the GCC BOSC 2018 conference, where I will present the Biopython Project Update 2018 talk tomorrow. Yesterday during my airport layover in Iceland, I published the Biopython 1.72 release to our website and PyPI:

https://biopython.org/wiki/Download https://pypi.python.org/pypi/biopython/1.72

This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6. It has also been tested on PyPy2.7 v6.0.0 and PyPy3.5 v6.0.0.

Internal changes to Bio.SeqIO have sped up the SeqRecord .format method and SeqIO.write (especially when used in a for loop).

We had another great round of applications for the OBF Travel Fellowship this spring. After reviewing the applications, the OBF Board selected three recipients, who have all accepted the award.

Congratulations to our spring 2018 recipients:

• Anisha Keshavan –  attended the eLife Innovation Sprint. Anisha is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, where she develops open source code, including citizen scientist platforms for image quality classification and image segmentation ( update - see blog post).
• Farah Zaib Khan – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Farah is a Common Workflow Language contributor based at the University of Melbourne. She has recently been working on a project to record the provenance of CWL workflows, and first attended BOSC in 2017 ( update - see blog post).
• Tendai Mutangadura – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Tendai is a first-time BOSC attendee who works at the University of Missouri and focuses on studying disease-causing mutations in canine genomics ( update - see blog post).

Watch this space for blog posts from each of the awardees ( update - links added above).

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.

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.