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This newsletter is chock-full of OBF updates. For a TL;DR version: read & comment on our affiliated project policy and code of conduct plans by December 1st, join our public board meeting on the 17th of December, and respond to our vision and mission survey.
In longer form:
Several of our board members' terms run out this year, so we'll be holding a public board meeting on the 17th of December, at 16:00 UTC (11am EST, 8am PST). The meeting will be held remotely, via conference call. As a public meeting, everyone is welcome to attend. Dial-in information and agenda will be posted on our blog (and also on Github).
Please participate in our vision and mission survey project.
Since 2000, the OBF community has grown organically with volunteers like you, who support a number of bioinformatics projects all across the globe. With our current member projects and a growing community, we would like to update our community's vision and mission statement.
We'd like to learn how well we're serving the community and what else we could be doing to help you out. We can't do this without your feedback, opinions, and insights. Please share your response with us by 15 January 2020.
In order to promote a healthy, friendly, and diverse community, we would like to agree upon a code of conduct (CoC) for our online interactions, face-to-face events, and for our member projects as well as OBF/BOSC directly. We've been thinking of basing ours on the CoC of The Carpentries - let us know what you think by December 1st, or read more about our plans on the OBF blog.
The OBF hosts multiple member organisations under the Bio* umbrella, including Biopython, BioPerl, BioJava, BioSQL, BioDAS, and BioRuby. Ever wondered whether your project might benefit from being under the OBF umbrella, and how to get there?
Thanks to a big push at the 2019 CoFest in Basel, a years-long effort to formalize how budding (or well established) open-source projects can become an OBF affiliated (or "member") project is now entering final draft stage. Concurrently with final review by the Board, we are asking the community to submit comments by November 29.
The policy document has from the beginning been developed as a pull request on the OBF documents repository. Public comments can simply be posted there. If you prefer to submit comments confidentially, please email the Board.
What's next? After final revisions prompted by community comments and Board review, the final draft will be submitted for a formal vote of approval to both the Board, and the OBF membership. We aim to accomplish this before the end of this year.
We are accepting applications for the next round, with a deadline of 1 December 2019. We've also made a few changes to the fellowship program for 2020 - the call will be opened twice instead of three times next year, and events will be eligible if they run in a one year window after each application deadline. Read this post for more details.
At the public board meeting at BOSC this year, Malvika Sharan was unanimously voted to join as a member of the Board of Directors. Welcome, Malvika! Read more on the OBF blog.
BOSC 2019 took place in Basel, Switzerland, July 24-25, as part of ISMB/ECCB 2019. The talks were recorded, and most of the videos are live on YouTube. An overview of the meeting was published online in this blog.
We all loved GCCBOSC in 2018, so we're excited to be back with the Galaxy community again in 2020. This time, it's branded as BCC - Bioinformatics Community Conference - it'll be in Toronto. Visit the BCC (mostly placeholder) site.
"Flip bits not burgers" - Google Summer of Code (GSoC) pays students to work on open source projects between May and August. Under the umbrella of the OBF, students from around the world worked on BioD, Sambamba, BioJS, antiSMASH, and the Journal of Open Data Publications. Read more about all of the projects and view the code on the Google Summer of Code site.
Interested in learning how to run a life science project openly, or know someone who does? Two mentoring programs (one tech platforms focused, one academia focused) are accepting applications until December 8th.
- Do you know someone in academia who struggled with their mental health, and needed support? Spend a few minutes sharing your experiences in supporting them. The survey is run by eLife and closes November 24.
- The ISCB now has a prize for student software - aimed at student ISCB members who create excellent bioinformatics software. The prize will be awarded annually and the first round of results will be announced soon.
- Cite.as is a web-based tool to make it easy to figure out how to cite anything, whether it's preprint, a GitHub repo, a paper, or something else.
Tell us about the things that catch your attention in the open source bioinformatics world! If you have an exciting project update, request for feedback, or interesting link, feel free to share it with us on GitHub, or contact Yo Yehudi (Twitter: @yoyehudi, Email: yochannah@gmail.com) if you're not sure whether or not your content is suitable for our newsletter - we're looking for content that's primarily open source / science related.