This is a guest blog post from Anton Khodak, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend a week long Common Workflow Language (CWL) workshop in London, November 2016.

The OBF has at least one public board meeting per year, in part to vote on important business issues, and in part to publicly discuss items relevant to the OBF community.  The latest public OBF Board of Director’s meeting took place October 4, 2016.

Agenda Venue: To be held by conference call on Oct 4, 2016, 12.30pm EDT (16:30 UTC, 17:30 BST, 18:30 CEST, 9.30am PDT)

We are happy to announce the long-awaited release of BioPerl v1.7.0.  The release is now available on CPAN and Github. During this release series, we will move some extraneous code to separate repositories and CPAN releases, primarily to reduce the number of dependencies required for BioPerl installation (in many cases for modules that are never used) and also reduce maintenance overhead.

We are pleased to announce the release of BioRuby 1.5.1. In this new release, NCBI Entrez web client classes, Bio::NCBI::REST and Bio::PubMed, are changed to use HTTPS instead of HTTP, to prepare NCBI website transitioning to HTTPS. For more information, see RELEASE_NOTES.rdoc and ChangeLog. The archive is available for download from the following links.

Dear Biopythoneers, Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.68 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5, but this will be our final release to run on Python 2.6. It has also been tested on PyPy 5.0, PyPy3 version 2.4, and

First I would like to congratulate OBF that supports diversity in the community with its travel awards initiative. I was very pleased to be one of the three travel fellowship awardees. Thank you OBF!

BioJava is organizing a design competition to come up with a new logo. Anybody can participate: The logo should look modern and be better than the current one (yellow circle) The logo should be able to be rendered as a favicon, as well as large (e.g. on a t-shirt). Designs that come in two (or multiple) sizes are ok. Logos shall not look similar in any way to the trademarked Java programming language logo.

This was long over-due, but Biopython 1.67 was released earlier today. The most recent delay was due to migrating our website from MediaWiki to GitHub Pages earlier this year, following an OBF server failure.

Every year, BOSC includes a panel discussion that offers attendees the chance to engage in conversation with the panelists and each other. BOSC is all about community, so this year’s panel topic– Growing and Sustaining Open Source Communities–is right at the heart of what we do. Since the first BOSC in 2000, we have focused on bringing together open source bioinformatics developers and users to form and expand collaborations and grow the

The first round of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program has granted funds to three open source bioinformatics software developers to help them attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2016 in Orlando, Florida, this July.