Talk:BOSC 2010

This page is being used for planning purposes. For official information, please see the BOSC 2010 Main Page.

Important Dates

NOTE: Dates in BOLD are determined by ISMB. Dates in italics are "penciled" in for planning purposes.

December 1, 2009: BOSC Special Interest Group Letter of Intent submitted to the ISMB SIG committee.
December 18, 2009: SIG Acceptance Notification
January 15, 2010: Instance of OCS set up and tested; Call for Abstracts opens
March 9, 2010: ISMB and BOSC registration opens
March 12, 2010: SIG Preliminary Program Due
April 15, 2010: Abstract deadline
April 15-30, 2010: Review period
April 23, 2010: SIG Program (preliminary) Available on Web
April 30-May 4: Resolution of conflicting reviews, decisions made
May 5, 2010: Notification of accepted abstracts
May 21, 2010: SIG Complete Program on Web
May 28, 2010: Early Registration Discount Cut-off Date
June 25, 2010: Handout Materials Due
July 9-10, 2010: BOSC 2010!

Bio* Updates: updates from O|B|F-sponsored projects
Open Source Software: any open source bioinformatics software that does not fall into a regular session category
Lightning Talks: short, 5 minute talks that highlight very recent developments

Please make suggestions for special topic sessions for BOSC 2010 here:

Please make suggestions for keynote speakers for BOSC 2010 here, or e-mail the organizing committee at bosc@open-bio.org

In terms of the focus of the conference, I was also doing a little brainstorming about options for the layout of the two days. What would you all think about moving away from the presentation and question/answer format towards something a bit more interactive? My rough idea would be to divide the days up into:
- Tutorial day -- In depth demonstrations and code tutorials. This could be lead off by the OBF projects instead of the traditional update talks, but could feature any open source projects interested. These would be hands on sessions with real code examples, with a focus on teaching people how to leverage various code bases to make real life work easier.
- Discussion day -- Following the hands on tutorial ideas, these would be interactive sessions focused around dealing with unsolved issues. The "speaker" would be responsible for setting up a set of discussion topics around an issue of interest, and then facilitating ideas and opinions from the attendees. The goals would be to talk through problems and gather a consensus about options for solving them.
One of the unique and awesome things about open source is that there are so many solutions out there that you have never heard about or don't know how to use. This sort of teaching and discussion forum could help lower the learning curve for people who have trouble getting started, and expand the set of toolkits for those who are already rolling with open source science work.

Hold a mini-hackathon in conjunction with BOSC. Kam has the action item of polling the project leaders/teams to see if people will come forward to organize. Some ideas for the hackathon:
- Next-gen sequencing
- Organizing bugs/tasks so that new beginners can start contributing to the project easily; working on some of those bugs/tasks.
- Something like the Genome Annotation Assessment Project (GASP) contest.
Reach out to the Teaching Open Source organization to invite them to participate in some fashion.