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Minutes:2008 BOSC Meeting
From Open Bioinformatics Foundation
Agenda
- Old Business
- Approval of minutes from 2007
- New Business
- Current Board
- Confirm past term expirations of those who did not run again for the Board.
- What to do about the Secretary seat?
- Some of the items on the agenda here need a legitimate vote by the Board (with prior notification and quorum satisfied). Should plan for a (presumably virtual) voting Board meeting soon afterwards.
- How can we better ensure quorum?
- Voting on the board appointments
- Kam Dalhquist has already served as a major organizer for BOSC and is interested in helping lead the OBF to achieve more outreach and education.
- Darin London has served as BOSC chair for the past 4 years
- Strengthen connection with O|B|J
- Procedure for appointment of additional BOD members
- Financial report (Treasurer)
- Account standing, reserves
- 501(c)3 accounting and filing status
- Sponsorship accounting
- BOSC
- Short 2007 report (attendance, talk highlights)
- BOSC 2008 summary (attendance, talk hightlights)
- Should BOSC 2009 to be held in conjuction with ISMB2009?
- Possibilities for including submitted papers for a publication.
- OBF Membership accounting and drive to register more members
- Membership forms physical records
- Members who are citizens of trade-restricted countries - legal advice, file for exemption?
- Form doesn't give date, need to amend
- OBF future directions
- Review of By-Laws (Parliamentarian)
- 10-days prior notice of Board meeting requirement: need to change or have a standing Board meeting (BoF) on day 1 or 2 of BOSC
- Not clear who elects officers - members may, but not a requirement, Directors can elect officers too. Leave as is or change?
- Current Board
Minutes
Location: Radisson Habourfront, 5th floor poolside, July 19, 2008
Present:
- current BoD members: Jason Stajich, Hilmar Lapp
- Director nominee: Kam Dahlquist
- Guests: Aaron Mackey, Mauricio Herrera Cuadro, Michael Heuer, Paul Gordon, Andrew Jenkinson, Saravanabamuttu Gnaneshan
Meeting minutes:
Approval of 2007 meeting notes
- unanimously approved
Introductions of present BoD members and guests
OBF Board
- Term expirations confirmed.
- Board currently consists of Jason Stajich, Hilmar Lapp, and Chris Dagdigian.
- How to ensure Board meetings to meet bylaw requirements?
- Teleconference over the phone
- IRC not favored, might pose undue burden, also identification might be problematic
- multi-jabber would be a possibility but also disfavored as creating a barrier (and technical issues)
- Teleconference will be our future modus for binding vote-entitled Board meetings, meetings at BOSC will have BoF/membership discussion character
- Soliciting new leadership contribution
- OBF is a volunteer effort.
- Ability of people to commit time may depend on their institution's or employer's commitment to support this.
- Frequent observation of volunteer projects is that there is a small group of people doing everything, getting burned out, and then moving on, requiring a new leadership to be recruited.
- One can only encourage people to join if there is critical mass, professional conduct.
- Consider projects and organizations that weren't presenting (Cytoscape and Ensembl as examples).
- Size of Board: bylaws doesn't make a stipulation.
- Election procedure
- Explained procedure laid out by the bylaws.
- Nominating committee should network and advertise broadly to obtain a pool of Director candidates.
- Aaron Mackey volunteers to serve on the Nominating Committee.
- Set ourselves a deadline of Sep 15 to have the nomination process complete and hold the BoD meeting the elects them.
- Will approach members and consituents for suggestions of whom to approach.
- Should aim for electing at least two new Directors, possibly 3.
- Kam is on slate to be nominated for Director, and is committed to serve.
- Should invite Darin London whether we would be interested in serving.
- Should invite Toshiaki Katayama, or someone else he suggests from OBJ, to serve.
- Would we want to be exclusionary to anyone? Only to people or organizations who would want to commercialize the organization, in whatever aspect.
- Secretary officer will temporarily held by Parliamentarian.
Financial report
- No update from Chris Dagdigian.
- Haven't lost any money, still have about $30,000 in two accounts.
- Kam will get ISMB account straightened out.
BOSC
- Bad catering for the meeting (only coffee, less-than-great lunch)
- No computer support for presentation.
- Need to resign ourselves to the fact that ISCB is factually no longer accountable to the SIGs since they absorb the losses and keep the profits.
- Concern that ISCB will factor the accounting such so that our historical surplus drops to zero, and may cut BOSC then.
- Is there an alternative venue for people to present instead of at BOSC?
- Possibly OSCON, but who would attend / be able to attend OSCON?
- ISMB covers many of the areas that motivates our constituency to come.
- Should we hold the meeting at the same place at ISMB but organize it separately?
- Conclusion: Hold BOSC 2009 in conjunction with ISMB.
- But don't want to end up with the same situation as in Brisbane.
- Supporting organizing committee attendance; OBF needs to be prepared to absorb the travel of the BOSC organizing committee chair (if the person's attempts to secure funding from elsewhere fail).
- Structure of BOSC:
- Balance between demonstrations and presentations should be improved.
- Could be very useful to fold OBF project tutorials (or others) into BOSC.
- Software could be subject of talks on the first and of tutorials on the second day. Should presenters come prepared to give tutorials?
- Content seems to work though for user-developers in terms of getting the information that they were looking for?
- Marketing the conference can be improved upon a lot.
- Professional review with for the first time got feedback to the submitters.
- Open source requirements were pretty rigorously enforced.
- Emphasis on quality should help with marketing in the future.
- BOSC 2007 attendance was around 80-90 (exact number is in the Google Doc - REPLACE)
- Have 77 primary sign-ups this year.
BOSC proceedings:
- Page charges from BMC are very high (BP850 normally, BP500 in bulk (BP10,000 for 20 papers) but then we have to do all the work ourselves).
- Authors may not have the incentive to use this venue because they may want to publish a full paper in a higher-impact venue.
- Should BOSC have Proceedings?
- People should have the possibility to present at BOSC.
- We are not at the level of quality as ISMB is.
- The main thing that comes out of BOSC is code, presentations don't really add the main value.
- We're not ready for having
- Looks like this is a non-issue?
OBF fund drive
- Using training to gain funds?
- Having more people on the Board should give us more possibilities to explore opportunities to raise funds.
- Sponsorship
- BioTeam donates bandwidth, colocation space, domain purchases. Should acknowledge that appropriately on the OBF website.
- Have sponsorship for BOSC from Helicos ($1000) and an anonymous donor ($250). The latter will fund the student travel fellowship and the former will subsidize the keynote speaker.
- Possibly remaining funds will be used towards travel fellowships in 2009.
- May in the future need to secure sponsorship to fund organizer travel.
Membership
- Trade restrictions:
- Can we re-incorporate in Canada?
- Should we seek legal advice? Yes, pro-bono if possible.
- Should chang the form to include date, having that is useful.