Belated, and probably most of you knew already, but just in case you didn’t, the 2009 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) was accepted on Dec 16 as a Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting by the respective ISMB 2009 review committee. Special thanks and congratulations to Kam Dahlquist, who agreed again this year to chair the conference, and who pulled the proposal together.

The minutes of the November 2008 O|B|F Board of Directors meeting have been posted. The most important result of that meeting is that Kam Dahlquist was elected to the Board, bringing the number of Board members back to four. Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Kam! We aim to elect additional Directors this year, please contact the Nominating Committee if you are interested in serving, or if you know people who might be.

BioPerl has branched for 1.6 and the RC1 is up for testing as Chris announced.

BioPerl is preparing for version 1.6 release in the coming months. As part of this some restructuring and simplification of the packaging is occurring. Bio-Graphics has been split off into its own package back on Sourceforge to allow for a separate release schedule. It will be uploaded to CPAN as a separate package. In the future other small groups of modules will also be split off from the Core.

We are pleased to announce the release of Biopython 1.49. There have been some significant changes since Biopython 1.48 was released a few months ago, which is why we initially released a beta for wider testing. Thank you to all those who tried this and reported the minor problems uncovered.

Scheduled for Nov 19, 12:30 - 2PM PST via Conference call.

The OBF Conference call is scheduled for 12:30PM to 2PM PST on Wednesday Nov 19, 2008.  Members of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and those interested in the decisions are invited to listen in and participate.  A brief agenda is available here. Please email Hilmar Lapp at hlapp _AT_ gmx.net for call in number and codes if you wish to participate or listen to the discussion.

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?

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.

We are pleased to announce a beta release of Biopython 1.49. There are been some significant changes since Biopython 1.48 was released two months ago, which is why we are initially releasing a beta for wider testing.

Many of you will be aware that Python 2.6 was released a month ago (October 1st, 2008). This supports a lot of new syntax and functionality, but also deprecates some old modules (e.g. the sets module). While Biopython 1.48 does mostly work with Python 2.6, we’ve been testing with Python 2.6 and have fixed a number of deprecations or breakages in our CVS repository.