The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is again participating in the Google Summer of Code program this year. Last Monday the selected students were announced. Congratulations to all of you, and a heartfelt welcome. I also want to use this opportunity to thank all students who applied. Resources were limited, we did not get all the slots that we asked for, and so we had to make some tough choices.
BioJava 5.0.0 was released on the 23rd of March 2018. This represents a major milestone that brings more consolidation and reorganisation of modules. This is the first release to be based on Java 8, bring in your lambdas and stream API calls! The release represents work done in the last 2 years, alpha releases were available for quite some time and now this makes all the changes officially public.
Dear Biopythoneers, Source distributions of Biopython 1.71 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI) including pre-compiled Wheel Packages for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
As mentioned in our previous blog post, last Friday the OBF had a board of directors meeting. One of the notable meeting items this time was to elect more board members to help be involved with the community. We’re pleased to announce that both candidates, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi, were unanimously voted in by the other board members!Logically, one of their first moves as newly minted members was to draft this blog post!
Dial-in information Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp Agenda Venue: To be held by conference call on March 16, 2018, 11.00am EDT (15:00 UTC, 16:00 CET, 8.00am PDT). Note that at the time of the meeting, the US will have switched already to DST, whereas Europe will not, so the time zone difference is an hour less than it would normally be. Dial-in
The OBF Board of Directors holds a public meeting about once a year, in accordance with our bylaws. The next such meeting will take place on March 16, 2018 , at 15:00 UTC (11am EDT / 8am PDT / 16:00 CET). The meeting agenda can be found at /wiki/Minutes:2018_Mar_ConfCall. At this public Board meeting, we will consider two new candidates running for Board seats: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi.
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the 2018 instance of the Google Summer of Code. OBF is acting as an umbrella for ten bioinformatics Open Source projects, making it possible to offer a very diverse set of student projects. Are you a student and interested in applying for any of the projects? The student application period is open from March 12th through 27th from the official GSoC website.
We are pleased to announce that abstract submission and early registration for GCCBOSC2018 are now open. This event brings our annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference and the Galaxy Community Conference together into a unified week-long event.
This blog post is syndicated from a post on Arun Decano’s blog, originally published Feb 1, 2018. Arun was supported by the ongoing OBF travel fellowship program to attend a Galaxy Admin Workshop held in Oslo, Norway Jan 7-14, 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences, workshops, or training events.
Arun Decano is a PhD research fellow in the Infection Genomics Group at Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland. Her research, with advisor Dr. Tim Downing, focuses on the phylogenomic study of a multidrug-resistant bacterial population and aims to develop novel infection control strategies using whole genome sequence data.
The OBF’s self-hosted mailman server is still struggling right now, so we are looking at migrating the active mailing lists to paid hosting, and as part of this consolidating down to ideally about a dozen mailing lists. Currently we have a lot of mailing lists, but many are dormant or redundant. Some were announcement specific, where nowadays blogs and Twitter work quite well.