Above: the old BOSC page. Below: the new one. If you’ve been around the OBF and BOSC community, you’re probably familiar with our slightly rusty old site, which ran on MediaWiki, the same open source software that runs Wikipedia. While they’re both awesome tools, we decided it was time for a refresh.

This is a guest blog post from Md Kamruzzaman Sarker, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend 2nd U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series (US2TS). The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. The current call closes on 15 April 2019.

This is a guest blog post from Lindsay Rutter, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend a National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) hackathon and the Plant and Animal Genome Conference (PAG). The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops.

BOSC 20xx panel Open Data: Standards, Opportunities and Challenges Every year, BOSC includes a panel discussion that offers attendees the chance to engage in conversation with the panelists and each other.

BOSC 2019 Schedule (2020 schedule is coming soon!) Schedule at a glance Download the program without the abstracts [PDF, 15 pages] Download the complete program including abstracts [PDF, 147 pages] Note to speakers Please copy your slides to the podium computer during the break before your session. Also, we encourage presenters to upload their slides to the BOSC F1000 collection.

Sponsoring BOSC Page with current BOSC Sponsors: open-bio.org/events/sponsors/ BOSC 2022 Platinum Sponsors BOSC 2022 Gold Sponsors BOSC 2022 Silver Sponsors Sponsorships from companies and organizations help to defray some of our costs and enable us to offer registration fee waivers for some conference participants.

We have recently applied to Google for the OBF to be part of the Google Summer of Code 2019 programme, again with Kai Blin and Michael Crusoe as joint administrators. Last year, OBF GSoC 2018, was another good year with five students successfully completing their projects: Synchon Mandal (mentor Moritz Beber) “Adding methods to cobrapy for improved constraint-based metabolic modelling.” ( first blog bost;

History 2000 First Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC). 2001 OBF grows out of volunteer projects BioPerl, BioJava and BioPython and is formally incorporated. 2005 Bylaws enacted for the first time and formal membership created. 2012 OBF becomes an associate project of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., a fiscal sponsorship organization.

We had a great round of OBF travel fellowship candidates in our last round of applications, and after review we extended offers to three deserving applicants: Malvika Sharan, Lindsay Rutter, and Sarker Kamruzzaman. They’ve all accepted the award, and we’re looking forward to hearing about their experiences! Congratulations to our December 2018 recipients: Malvika Sharan will be attending BOSC at ISMB 2019 in Basel this July.

CollaborationFest 2021 In conjunction with our annual meeting, BOSC, the OBF runs a collaborative event (formerly called CodeFest, short for coding festival, and now called CollaborationFest, or CoFest for short). At these events, participants work together to contribute contribute code, documentation, training materials, and challenging analysis problems and use cases.

Birds of a Feather (BoFs) Birds of a Feather (BoFs) are informal, self-organized meetups focused on specific topics. They are a great way to meet other like-minded community members and have an in-depth discussion on a topic of interest. The BCC2020 BoF schedule is here. BoFs are held just before and after each day of the main conference. BCC2020 attendees are also welcome to organize informal BoFs as table chats.