The BOSC 2010 organizing committee is hard at work getting prepared for this July’s meeting in Boston:
One of the items we’ve traditionally had at the conference is a project update from each of the OpenBio affiliated groups. This year, we’re thinking about organizing these talks around a central theme: the OpenBio solution challenge. We start with a biological question of general interest, and each of the project talks would focus around how you would solve that problem using your toolkit and programming language.
This is meant to provide a challenge for OpenBio contributors, a nice tutorial style overview of various projects and approaches for other programmers, and a fun opportunity to compete and learn from other projects. Conference attendees will vote on their favorite solution, with the winner receiving fame and fortune (warning: fortune not guaranteed).
For this to be successful, it of course requires interest and enthusiasm from y’all fine folks involved with the projects. Specifically:
- Is there interest from your group in participating in the challenge? You’ll want at least a few people interesting in working on it, and someone to give a presentation at BOSC.
- Do you have suggestions on a good theme or specific biological problem to tackle? We’ll hope to pick something in a sweet spot that is challenging enough to be of interest, yet reasonable for presentation and preparation.
Let’s discuss ideas and get this together. Since the schedule for BOSC is developing rapidly, please give us an idea if you’re interested by February 12th, and copy responses to the BOSC mailing list as a central place for discussion.