OBF students and mentors at an OBF kickoff call Every year the OBF applies to participate as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code, a paid work experience program where students get the chance to do paid work on an open source project and open source organisations host the students to work on their projects.

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 shared interest. BoFs at ISMB/ECCB 2021 will take place each day of the meeting except the last day, at the same time as the poster session (not ideal, we know–but there are only so many viable hours in the day), from 15:20-16:20 UTC.

Thanks to funding from our sponsors, we are opening a special call for applications to the BOSC-OBF Event Support Fund.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program supports and encourages diverse participation at events focusing on open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community.

The BOSC 2021 talks and poster videos are now available on YouTube! BOSC 2021 schedule at a glance (Scroll down to see the whole schedule.) BOSC 2021 Talk Schedule The schedule below includes keynote talks, talks from submitted abstracts, and relevant Birds of a Feather. (Scroll down to see the whole schedule.) For more details, including short abstracts, see the ISMB/ECCB BOSC schedule.

Biopython 1.79 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. This is the final release supporting Python version 3.6. It also supports Python versions 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9, as well as PyPy 3.6.1 v7.1.1. The major changes in this version are listed below: - The Seq and MutableSeq classes in Bio.Seq now inherit from the same base class, ensuring their mutual consistency.

There’s still a chance to submit your abstract in the Late Poster round, which closes June 3 at 11:59pm ET! What about late-breaking lightning talks? Unfortunately/fortunately, we got so many high-quality abstracts in the early round, we were not able to save any talk slots for the late round.

The OBF is committed to providing a harassment-free and respectful environment for all members of our community. To ensure that we are clearly describing norms, rules, and recommended practices for all our participants and members, we have provided a first draft of the OBF Code of Conduct and shared it recently in our newsletter.

The following outlines a potential new grant programme, subject to approval by the OBF membership in a formal vote, which the OBF board would hope to launch this year. Motivation In 2016, the OBF introduced a “Travel Fellowship” to help individuals attend meetings, aiming to improve diversity in the bioinformatics community. Awardees were reimbursed (with receipts) after the event in which they participated, with a standard cap of USD $1000.

BOSC is organized entirely by volunteers. We are lucky to have these amazing people on the Organizing Committee this year! Jason Williams ( @JasonWilliamsNY) is a new member of the BOSC Organizing Committee, though he’s been a BOSC participant and an abstract reviewer for years.

Are you thinking of writing an abstract for BOSC? We’re here to help! The BOSC Organizing Committee is holding two “abstract parties” that will be fun collaborative work sessions. We’ll start by giving some tips for writing a great BOSC abstract, and then open the floor to questions and “workshopping”: show us your in-progress abstract, and we’ll give you helpful suggestions.