Posts

Online. By at least a factor of two. Our recent article entitled Lessons learnt from organizing a virtual conference discusses some of our technology choices and how we leveraged them to put on a successful online meeting. That article touches briefly on some of the challenges we faced, but it doesn’t fully convey how much work it was–both in advance and during the event. Before we go any further, who are you? [Read More]

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Pengfei Fan, a researcher from Queen Mary University of London, was supported to participate in CLEO 2020 by this fellowship granted to him in the application round-1 of 2020. Find more information here. During the last two decades, we are witnessing a fascinating growth of computational imaging (CI) methods, e. [Read More]

We are glad to announce that the call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 October 2020. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. Renaming from “OBF Travel Fellowship” to “OBF Event Fellowship” One of the goals of the OBF fellowship is to increase the participation of members from traditionally underrepresented groups at events or communities that promote Open Source software development and/or open science practices in the biological sciences. [Read More]

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Gigi Kenneth, a biochemistry undergrad and a bioinformatics enthusiast from Nigeria, was supported to participate in Bioinformatics Community Conference 2020 by this fellowship granted to her in the application round-1 of 2020. Find more information here. I’m a biochemistry undergraduate, in my final year from the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. [Read More]

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Edidiong Etuk (Eddie), an open-source lover and a software engineer from Nigeria, was supported to take part in Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2020 by this fellowship granted to him in the application round-1 of 2020. Find more information here. TL;DR This post is about my experience at Bioinformatics Community Conference 2020. [Read More]

After much discussion, the BCC2020 organizing committee has decided to hold the meeting on Remo.co, which is similar to Zoom but offers a more conference-like experience, with “floors” and “tables” where you can mingle with other attendees. It has great small group and presentation support, including for posters and demos. It’s also more fun than most online conference platforms. Because Remo is not familiar to most BCC participants, we are holding two open houses, one in each hemisphere, the day before BCC training starts. [Read More]

Biopython 1.77 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. This is the first release since we dropped support for Python 2.7 and 3.5. Focusing on Python 3.6 or later will let us take advantage of new functionality and syntax, and simplify our code base and testing. This release of Biopython supports Python 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 It has also been tested on PyPy3.6.1 v7.1.1. pairwise2 now allows the input of parameters with keywords and returns the alignments as a list of namedtuples. [Read More]

We’re old hands at organizing in-person BOSC s (some of us were involved in planning the very first BOSC, in 2000), but this is the first time we’re attempting an online conference, and we want your help to make BCC2020 a rewarding experience for all. We know many of you have attended other virtual conferences recently, and we’re interested in hearing what worked well and what didn’t. In particular, we are trying to figure out how to make virtual posters work, and how to run Q&A (with audio, or just typed? [Read More]

on behalf of the OBF Board members We are delighted to announce that four awardees have been selected to receive the OBF travel fellowship for 2020 round 1, to support their participation in virtual events. The OBF travel fellowship is now offered 2 times a year to multiple awardees towards supporting their participation in scientific workshops, conference and training events. The selection of individuals is made based on their applications, which state how their participation in the chosen event helps them promote open science practices in bioinformatics and/or enhance representation of minority groups in their communities. [Read More]