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.

BOSC typically includes a panel discussion that offers attendees the chance to engage in conversation with the panelists and each other.

BCC2020 Keynote Speakers The 2020 Bioinformatics Community Conference is pleased to announce our exceptional keynote speakers for BCC2020: Lincoln Stein Head, Adaptive Oncology at Ontario Institute for Cancer Research How Open Source has Changed the World Lincoln Stein focuses on supporting biomedical research both in Ontario and around the world by making large and complex biological datasets findable, accessible and usable.

BOSC 2017 Schedule This page has links to all the publicly available talk slides, videos and posters. Most of the slides and posters are on our BOSC F1000 Research Collection(others are on SlideShare and FigShare), while the videos are on the BOSC 2017 YouTube playlist.

What is BOSC? The B ioinformatics O pen S ource C onference promotes and facilitates the open source development of bioinformatics tools and open science. Since it launched in 2000, BOSC has been part of ISMB every year except for 2018 and 2020. In 2020, BOSC partnered with GCC to form the Bioinformatics Community Conference, BCC2020.

Check out the complete BOSC 2020 conference schedule! Blog posts about BCC2020: Lessons learned from organizing a virtual conference; Why planning an online conference is hard. BOSC 2020 BCC2020, the first Bioinformatics Community Conference, brought together the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) and the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) in a joint ONLINE meeting in July 2020.

The OBF Code of Conduct was adopted after being voted on by our members in January 2022, following the OBF Public Board meeting in September 2021. Our annual conference, BOSC, is normally run as part of the ISMB meeting, where it therefore follows the OBF Code of Conduct.

Support the OBF Sponsorship opportunities Our annual meetings, BOSC and the CollaborationFest, are supported in part by sponsorships. Please see the Sponsors page for more information. Tax-free donations Through our fiscal sponsor, Software in the Public Interest, Inc., you can donate to the OBF via PayPal or online by credit card.