Minutes:2015 May ConfCall

Posted on May 12, 2015 by admin

Agenda

Venue: to be held by conference call on May 12, 2015, 1pm EDT (17:00 UTC, 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST, 10am PDT) 
Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

  1. Old business
  2. New business
    1. Term expirations and Elections for the Board
    2. BOSC 2015: update from the 2015 chairs (Nomi, Peter)
    3. Update on ISCB “Community of Special Interest” (COSI) (Peter)

Minutes

Etherpad for notes: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/OBF-BoD-Meeting-May2015

Attending:

  • Directors: Present: Chris Fields (via phone), Hilmar, Chris Dag., Nomi Harris, Peter Cock.
  • Guests: Karen Cranston (Board candidate)

Minutes:

UTC/GMT 17:05- Hilmar called the meeting to order.

  1. Old business
  2. Elections for the board.
    • One candidate, Karen Cranston.
    • Statement: Karen is Training Coordinator and Informatics Project Manager at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). Mentor and administrator for NESCent GSoC. She is an evolutionary biologist interested in phylogenetic methods and is the lead PI of Open Tree of Life, an NSF-funded project to synthesize published evolutionary trees. She’s helped organize many events for open source and data interoperability in biology, including Phyloinformatics Summer of Code, iEvoBio, hackathons, and Data / Software Carpentry workshops. Many parallels with what the OBF is interested in, and particularly interested in our recent diversity discussion.
    • Karen confirms monthly meetings at this time (generally the second Tuesday of the month at 1pm ET) will not be a problem for her schedule.
    • Hilmar moves for the board to cast their ballots (for electing Karen Cranston as a new OBF board member) online via heliosvoting.org; 6 votes for, 0 against, 0 abstentions. https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/04a3511e-f8af-11e4-828f-769695b8596f/view
    • ACTION: Peter to update the blog post for this meeting. [Done]
    • The board unanimously thanks the two departing members for their service to the board and wider community since the founding of the OBF, and before.
  3. BOSC
    • Good set of abstract received, acceptances sent out (only one has declined so far).
    • Will be calling for “late breaking” lightning talks and posters in June (with people who were only offered a poster invited to improve their abstract and be considered for a possible late-breaking lightning talk).
    • We are still polishing the schedule, currently reserving 30 minutes for 6 late breaking lightning talks.
    • It is not unusual to have Lightning talks without questions, so we will likely not have questions after them given the tight schedule.
    • Student authors, panellists, keynote speakers, committee members have been offered fee waivers. Thus far we are only planning to pay for travel for our keynote speakers.
    • Looking to record talks via the ISCB this year (to be made open, speakers able to opt out).
    • ACTION: Plan putting COSI membership to the OBF membership, including commitments and consequences (e.g. what happens if we leave with escrow etc).
    • We will be able to access the ISCB membership roll for those who have ticked the OBF as a COSI they are interested in, and check if they want to formally join the OBF.
  4. Membership
    • Agreement that current “paper” system is no longer suitable. Current by-laws mean we want verified email addresses, and do not disclose them. This excludes a public wiki or document on GitHub (like https://github.com/pjotrp/bioinformatics for example), Google Forms (cannot check email address), but perhaps a GitHub team might work (this would require OBF members create a GitHub account, but does not force them to disclose their email address).
  5. System Administration:
    • Wiki needs updating for Google OpenID

UTC/GMT 17:53 Meeting Adjoined.

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