Minutes of 2002 BOSC Meeting
August 2, 2002
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Call to order
Board members present: Hilmar, Chris, Ewan, Steven, Andrew
Recognition of observers (about 21)
This meeting was open to the the public. I don’t know all of the people who commented, hence the question marks.
Review of schedule by Ewan
Steven – asked about money owed us from Hidelberg meeting
Chris – says it’s about 20-30 commercial people
Decided to follow up on that money – assigned to Chris (AI)
Steven – asked about audit
Chris, financials Jan. to Jan. year; report out next year
Action item: Chris to find an accountant to audit
BOSC 2003, lead by Ewan
- do we want BOSC next year? if yes:
- part of ISMB?
- affiliated with other projects
straw vote showed enthusiastic support for BOSC 2003
Lincoln suggested survey of attendees tomorrow
?? suggested too small for standalone conference
Martin – price to Oz not bad
Chris – but subjective impression of distance
??? – will be better Asia/Pacific input
Janet – A/P can help grow the community
Ewan – build a travel fund?
??? – give concrete examples of other conference sites when doing the survey
ORA would be too expensive and submerged
RECOMB in April in Berlin
Thomas – reemphasized the international / worldwide aspect of the conference
Lincoln – web meetings cut in half when moved to OZ
Chris – worried about losing people for next year, re costs, esp. if using professional organization
Organizing BOSC 2003, lead by Ewan
Request for volunteers – all declined
Request for suggestions of volunteers
Ewan volunteered Elia Stupka
Elia tentatively agreed this morning
Doreen said she would help, but not organize
Motion: Ewan nominated Elia as organizer.
Andrew seconded
Motion passsed by unanimous consent
Motion: Ewan nominated Doreen as “BOSC 2004 organizer in waiting”
Chris seconded
Motion passsed by unanimous consent
2003 Hackathon, lead by Ewan
Belief that hackathon helped in intergroup cohesiveness and should be repeated
Andrew: What about funding?
Chris: I3C, through Brian Gilman, may fund the hackathon
Cost between 30 to 50 grand
Jason: What influence will I3C have on the funding /
what will they get out of it?
Ewan: Sponser should not have influence on the scedule.
May pick some attendees, write press.
Hilmar: What about government funding?
Ewan: Overhead is prohibitive compared to corporate sponsership. Steven: Could redirect gov’t funding through a university (as was done for ISMB, using San Diego)
Matthew: hackathon a great idea
Lincoln: we should be able to get corporate sponsership pretty easily – great press
??? – didn’t get much output / documentation / etc
Ewan: we should invite documenters
Hilmar: What about a ‘doc-athon’?
Ewan: doc people may find the social interactions of a hackathon more useful
Motion: Create a hackathon committee with Ewan as chair. Main goals are to identify funding sources and site for hackathon.
Chris seconded.
Motion passsed by unanimous consent
Misc., lead by Ewan
Chris: Interest earned by idle cash
Motion: Chris Investigate ways to make interest in no-risk way to make interest.
Ewan seconded.
Motion passsed by unanimous consent
OBF Branding
Should we work on a logo?
Tentative yes.
Idea is to get community input for logo and get a professional organization to cleaned up. Also work on unifying web pages, etc.
Hilmar: Why?
Chris: Help present a more professional image
Ewan: Likes O|B|F
Andrew agrees.
Motion by Steven that Chris can spend up to $2,000 on the branding project, with further discussion to occur.
Ewan seconded.
Motion passsed by unanimous consent
Digital certificates
BioJava wants to sign jar files. May want secure web connections May want multiple certificates, eg, one for the different projects.
Lincoln: certificates for web different than for jar and has its own costs. Agreed that we can ignore secure web connections. Chris: jar signing costs a few $100 a year
Matthew: who has signing authority?
Virus scanning of inbound and outbound mail.
Ewan: Authorize Chris to look into virus scanning and digital certificates, report costs and benefits, and allow a vote on expenses over email.
Andrew seconds.
Motion passed by unanimous consent
Steven:relevant NIH grants, like conference grants we are a “rounding error” compared to most conferences but grant administration has overhead. Another grant: PAs, as for software development should we investigate that? Probably no, but proposing the idea
Andrew: what is a PA?
Program announcement, interested in area, expect to spend money, doesn’t guarantee funding, but encourages.
Lincoln: some can be recurring
Doreen: funds for technical writer or other non-developer Chris: OBF lacks in administration; what’s the overhead? Lincoln (and Steven): would need to admin through a site (like CSHL) with experience in admin’ing these sorts of grants. Ewan: We direct and support groups which get the PA funding, rather than go through us. Is that feasible?
Lincoln: Study sections are mostly concerned about the likelihood of success, so shouldn’t be a problem
Decided that Steven would encourage others to work with the OBF, but not really look for it outselves, unless it was really adventagous
No need for a motion.
More enthusiastic about the NIH grant
Steven: we should provide more funding to speakers
Ewan suggested that Doreen look into funding, esp. long term (5 year funding) from NIH
Chris offered to help
Steven:Do we need a response to the ISCB open source statement found in …. ? Some statements are quite wrong, in the view of many open source people.
Ewan: OBF stay away from policy influence as an organization Andrew: why bother?
Steven: what about a simple statement in the minutes?
Johann: Win (and others) pointed out corrections before it was published, and it still went through.
Janet: would it interfere with our associations with ICMB? Lincoln: we should be a more vocal source
Ewan: but we are a support organization, not leading the direction. Uncomfortable with setting the direction. Lincoln: this is a clarification of our policy
Lincoln: should there be a response? No, theirs is a reponse to ours. First, check our statement to see if we agree with it.
Ewan: reads statement aloud. Ewan and Andrew are still comfortable. Some questions about wording. Steven clarified. Chris: we should mention this to people tomorrow, esp. those who are members, to reponse individually
Lincoln: document will be used as leverage to funding agencies to justify research proposal. Eg, “this isthe ISCB approved level 3 development model”. Used for policy decisions. Jason: as members we should be offended, but OBF? not sure. Andrew: I haven’t read this document yet.
Ewan: Stay away from “journalistic ping-pong”
Steven: vote was close. Be polite, but make our point(as ISCB members) known.
???: could argument from a technical level be used for leverage.
Ewan and Lincoln: no
Matthew: statement should say what open source means
Motion by Ewan to modify statement to point to the opensource.org definition of “open source” and to confer later to clarify our position.
Steven seconded.
Motion passsed by unanimous consent
Vote to accept minutes of last meeting. Unanimous consent.
Make meeting minutes available. Question about making comments from people publically available. No one objected nor wanted to be anonymous.
Mark Wilkinson wanted to assign BioMOBY copyright to OBF Consensus is that we see no problems with that
??? what about moving services to collab.net / sourceforge-style installation
Ewan: suggest talking with Chris about that; don’t yet need board involvement
Lincoln: keep our own hardware. Yep.
Steven: want to make publications at least as available as the software.
Ewan: declined to accept that topic — getting late
Hilmar: How do we handle nominations for new board members? Expanding the board?
Chris: we have some templates already which we could use
Chris: call for suggestions (eg, from church groups and other non-profits organization
Action item: Hilmar will look into this
Chris proposed we adjurn.
Ewan seconded.
Motion passed by unanimous consent.