Minutes:2007 BOSC Meeting

Posted on July 21, 2007 by admin

Venue: Cafe Prückl, Vienna
Date: 7/21/2007, 5.30pm
Attending: Jason Stajich (OBF President), Hilmar Lapp (OBF Parliamentarian), Darin London, Kam Dahlquist

BOSC

  • Had 94 attendees registered specifically for BOSC as of July 9th
  • Do we have an audience? Is there a niche that BOSC continues to fill? The numbers seem to speak a clear voice.
  • Show-and-tell was received positively, but didn’t play as big a role anymore
  • Want to continue running the conference
  • Venue:
    • Seems much favorable to associate with an existing major event
    • One model could be to associate with different events on an alternating basis, such as IMSB every other year and a different conference every other year
  • Need a new Organizing Committee, several people volunteered to help organizing
    • Committee should decide on sessions, timetable, outreach venues
    • Session chairs who are also charged to identify the most desirable speakers
    • Should have budget to reimburse travel for key speakers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to come
    • Need to look into venue and procedure for publishing the talks
    • Include a hackathon?

Action items:

  • Darin to craft on-line feedback survey for BOSC
  • Darin to draft initial call for nomination to the BOSC Organizing Committee (BOC)
  • Darin to collate required responsibilities for the BOC in the run up to the conference

Open-Bio Board

  • Membership of the BOD
    • Current members are technically Jason Stajich, Chris Dagdigian, Andrew Dalke, Ewan Birney, Hilmar Lapp
    • Steven Brenner resigned in 2006.
  • Financial report:
    • Have $15k in the bank.
    • Have not filed a tax report since incorporation.
    • Need to hire an accountant (for filing tax reports), lawyer (re-incorporate).
    • (Paste points from Chris’ letter here)

Mission of the organization

  • Want do continue what we do right now, i.e., infrastructure support for the projects
    • Should ask project leaders for what they need
  • Should we take a more active role?
    • Public opinion forming on open source software?
    • Should be present at the open-source panel
    • Outreach and education?
  • Advertising and outreach for BOSC is also advertising for OBF
    • Makes us appear on people’s minds, something that people want to be a part of
    • Regular letters about news of BOSC
    • OBF official blog?
  • Community building:
    • Creating ways for people to reach others
    • Providing a forum for people to engage in discourse about how to advance the state of open source in bioinformatics
    • Connect possibly “competing” projects to make an attempt at advancing the quality and availability of software
    • Coordinate meet-ups of people at other events (other than BOSC)
    • Must not be exclusive or ideologic
  • Create a year-long plan leading up to BOSC 2008
    • Generate excitement
    • Need mechanism to identify who is currently on the board
    • Need mechanism to identify those who aren’t contributing, and remove them from board
    • Need to identify new treasurer
    • Need to identify candidates who would like to serve on the board
    • Revitalize and reform the board

Action items:

  • Jason to identify a lawyer
  • Jason to investigate and identify mailing address
  • Will hold follow-up conference call (phone or skype or IRC) in August

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