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.

BOSC 2021 will take place July 29-30, as part of ISMB/ECCB 2021 Online.

Christie Bahlai ( Kent State University) Significant heterogeneities: Ecology’s emergence as open and synthetic science ABSTRACT: Ecology has undergone several major cultural shifts in the past century. Eager to define the field as a ‘hard’ science distinct from natural history, early 20th century ecologists rigorously tested theory through intensive, controlled experiments, often working in relative isolation.

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2021, round 1 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 2021. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We invite applications from candidates who are seeking financial support to attend or host virtual events in 2021.

TL;DR: Nominate candidates or yourself for the OBF board via this form or work with OBF in other volunteer capacities. Nominations are welcome for the OBF Board election OBF is committed to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community.

It’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) application time again - I’ll be leading the OBF GSoC application and org admin process this year alongside Sarthak Sehgal, Michael Crusoe, and Kai Blin.

About three years ago I nervously responded to a blog post from the OBF looking for board member applications from people who were interested in leading open science related initiatives. This went as well as I possibly could have hoped - both myself and the other applicant, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, officially joined the board in March of 2018 for a three-year term.

BOSC is returning to ISMB in 2021, after a successful partnership with Galaxy for the first Bioinformatics Community Conference last year ( BCC2020 online). Originally slated to take place in Lyon, France, ISMB/ECCB 2021 announced today that the conference will be virtual. This news may be disappointing to some, but for others it offers an opportunity to participate in a conference that they would not have been able to travel to attend.

CollaborationFest 2020 As part of BCC2020, the first Bioinformatics Community Conference, the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) and the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) co-sponsored an online CollaborationFest, a 2 (or 4) day collaborative work event where our community gathered virtually to contribute code, documentation, training materials, and challenging analysis problems and use cases.