Obf

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.

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.62 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and ( soon) from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

Python support

This is our first release of Biopython which officially supports Python 3. Specifically, this is supported under Python 3.3. Older versions of Python 3 may still work albeit with some issues, but are not supported.

We still fully support Python 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7. Support under Jython is available for versions 2.5 and 2.7 and under PyPy for versions 1.9 and 2.0. However, unlike CPython, Jython and PyPy support is partial: NumPy and our C extensions are not covered.

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).

I am very pleased to announce that the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F) is now a Software in the Public Interest (SPI) associated project, rather than its own not-for-profit incorporation.

An electronic vote of O|B|F members on whether or not to provisionally approve the invitation from SPI closed yesterday at 19:00 UTC. We had a participation of 39 out of 105 eligible, or 37%, which is far above the quorum of 10%. The tally is 38 for provisionally accepting and 1 against. The tally can be seen (and audited) here: https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/e/OBFjoiningSPI

This is a reminder from the BOSC 2009 Organizing committee that abstracts for BOSC are due on Monday, April 13.

The OBF board meeting will be held via conference call on Nov 19, from 12:30PM to 2PM PST.  Agenda items and information about participating is available on the agenda webpage. We anticipate this call primarily to manage administrative tasks for the foundation. We welcome input on including more members in the OBF leadership and helping set the direction for the foundation.