| Please visit our ***NEW*** OBF/BOSC website: https://www.open-bio.org/ |
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Main Page
Through our fiscal sponsor, Software in the Public Interest, Inc., you can donate to the OBF, including online by credit card. Donations made through SPI are 501(c)3 tax-exempt in the US. (SPI also has a charitable partner organization in Europe.) Your contribution helps fund a growing community of people committed to developing reusable open-source software for advancing biological research.
OBF Public Board Meeting: 2023-12-19, 11am EST
- All are invited to join us (via Zoom) at the OBF’s upcoming public Board meeting. Date, Time, and How to […]
OBF and BOSC leaving Twitter/X
- As of November 21, 2023, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and BOSC will no longer post on Twitter/X. Although in the […]
Call for the third round of OBF Event Fellowship 2023 & overview of the second 2023 round.
- The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2023, round 3, is now open. The deadline for this round […]
BOSC CollaborationFest 2023 Report
- BOSC CoFest 2023 was organized in Lyon, as a satellite event of BOSC. CoFest is a free hackathon-style event, where participants gather in small gr...
- Sierra Moxon to speak about “LinkML: an open data modeling framework, grounded with ontologies” [If you missed the webinar,...
About Us
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) is a non-profit, volunteer-run group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community.
Our main activities are:
- Running and supporting the BOSC conferences.
- Organizing and supporting developer-centric "Hackathon" events.
- Participating in the Google Summer of Code program on behalf of our member projects as an umbrella mentoring organization.
- Running the OBF Travel Fellowship program (launched March 2016).
- Managing servers, colocation facilities, bank account, domain names, and other assets for the benefit of our member projects.
- Public opinion and policy statements about matters related to Open Source and Open Science in bioinformatics.
The Foundation does not participate directly in the development or structure of the open source work, but as the members of the foundation are drawn from our projects' developer communities, there is clear commonality of direction and purpose.
The OBF is governed by a Board of Directors. Our bylaws lay out how the Board is elected, holds public meetings, and conducts its business, as well as the scope and role of our membership. OBF is an associated project with Software In The Public Interest, Inc., a fiscal sponsorship organization, and through SPI we can accept tax-exempt charitable donations.
The OBF is open to anyone who is interested in promoting open source bioinformatics / open science. Please see the Membership page for more information.
History
OBF grew out of the volunteer projects BioPerl, BioJava and Biopython and was formally incorporated in 2001 in order to handle modest requirements of hardware ownership, domain name management and funding for conferences and workshops. In 2005, we enacted bylaws for the first time, and along with it created a formal membership.
In 2012, we decided to give up our own incorporation to associate ourselves with Software In The Public Interest, Inc., a fiscal sponsorship organization that we felt aligned well with our own values and culture. The bylaws underwent a series of changes, in part to better reflect our current practices, and in part to pave the way for joining SPI. The changes were approved on Sep 11, 2012, our membership overwhelmingly approved of associating with SPI, and as of October 12, 2012, OBF is a SPI-associated project.
BOSC
The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) has been held annually in conjunction with ISCB's meeting, ISMB, for the past 20 years. BOSC 2017 took place in July 2017, right before ISMB 2017 in Prague, Czech Republic.
For 2018, we are trying something different and holding BOSC along with the Galaxy Community Conference in a new unified event (GCC BOSC 2018), which will take place in Portland, Oregon, June 25-30.
We typically run an informal Codefest collaborative meeting before each BOSC.
