Obf

At the OBF’s July 2019 public Board meeting (held at BOSC 2019), Malvika Sharan was unanimously elected as a new at-large Board member. Malvika, who earned a PhD in bioinformatics at the University of Würzburg, is a community outreach coordinator at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg. She is passionate about promoting the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in bioinformatics and STEM in general. Malvika recently won a fellowship from the Software Sustainability Institute to support her research into identifying and developing effective training strategies in low-income research environments (limited resources, lack of funding, etc. [Read More]

On July 25, 2019, the OBF held a public Board meeting in Basel, Switzerland. Organized as a Birds of a Feather session at BOSC 2019, the meeting was open to all attendees at ISMB. All but one of the current Board members were present (Secretary Chris Fields called in), as well as a number of ISMB/BOSC attendees. At the meeting, Malvika Sharan was elected as a new Board member. Other topics of discussion included the need for a Code of Conduct that applies to member projects as well as covering the yearly BOSC meeting; the policy for accepting new member projects; revisiting the OBF’s mission statement; and considering whether the OBF should issue position statements. [Read More]

The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics. Applications are reviewed three times a year. Applicants may apply for attending any event that develops or promotes open source development and open science in the biological research community. It doesn’t have to be an OBF-related event, and it can be one that you already attended in the recent past. For example, if you attended BOSC 2019 and your travel expenses were not covered by your employer or university, you could apply for a travel fellowship to help defray those expenses (up to a maximum of $1000, in most cases). [Read More]

Above: the old BOSC page. Below: the new one. If you’ve been around the OBF and BOSC community, you’re probably familiar with our slightly rusty old site, which ran on MediaWiki, the same open source software that runs Wikipedia. While they’re both awesome tools, we decided it was time for a refresh. Over the last few months, our Outreachy Intern Deepashree Deshmukh designed and implemented the new OBF website(with supervision by OBF Board member Yo Yehudi). [Read More]

This is a guest blog post from Md Kamruzzaman Sarker, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend 2nd U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series (US2TS). The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. The current call closes on 15 April 2019. If you are hoping to attend an open source / open science bioinformatics even and travel costs are a barrier, we encourage you to apply for one of our $1000 travel fellowships. [Read More]

This is a guest blog post from Lindsay Rutter, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend a National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) hackathon and the Plant and Animal Genome Conference (PAG). The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. The current call closes on 15 April 2019. If you are hoping to attend an open source / open science bioinformatics even and travel costs are a barrier, we encourage you to apply for one of our $1000 travel fellowships. [Read More]

We have recently applied to Google for the OBF to be part of the Google Summer of Code 2019 programme, again with Kai Blin and Michael Crusoe as joint administrators. Last year, OBF GSoC 2018, was another good year with five students successfully completing their projects: Synchon Mandal (mentor Moritz Beber) “Adding methods to cobrapy for improved constraint-based metabolic modelling.” ( first blog bost; final report) Sophia Mersmann (mentors Oliver Alka, Julianus Pfeuffer, and Timo Sachsenberg) “Improve Posterior Error Probability Estimation For Peptide Search Engine Results” (blog posts; final report) Edgar Garriga Nogales (mentors Paolo Di Tommaso, Michael R. [Read More]

We had a great round of OBF travel fellowship candidates in our last round of applications, and after review we extended offers to three deserving applicants: Malvika Sharan, Lindsay Rutter, and Sarker Kamruzzaman. They’ve all accepted the award, and we’re looking forward to hearing about their experiences! Congratulations to our December 2018 recipients: Malvika Sharan will be attending BOSC at ISMB 2019 in Basel this July. Abstract submissions have only just opened, but she intends to submit an abstract expanding on the idea “Inclusiveness in Open Science” that she spoke about last year ( slides). [Read More]

We have successfully crowd-sourced a new OBF logo! The process started at the OBF Birds of a Feather meeting at GCCBOSC 2018 when the OBF leaders announced that we were seeking a new logo design. Two BoF participants immediately started sketching ideas, as well as a third community member who was not at the BoF but saw our tweet. The designs (which you can see here) were put up for a public vote. [Read More]