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CoFest 2019
Open Bioinformatics Foundation Collaboration Fest (CoFest) 2019 will be July 26th and 27th, 2019 (the Friday and Saturday after BOSC 2019 and the ISMB/ECCB 2019 meeting) at The Swiss Innovation Hub for Personalized Medicine in Basel, Switzerland.
CoFest is an opportunity for anyone interested in open science, biology and programming to meet, discuss and work collaboratively. Everyone is welcome to attend. We will have a mix of experienced developers, users, trainers, and researchers, newcomers to bioinformatics, and everything in between.
This will be the 10th annual pre- or post-BOSC collaboration fest. Previous fun and successful events were Codefest 2010 in Boston, Codefest 2011 in Vienna, Codefest 2012 in Los Angeles, Codefest 2013 in Berlin, Codefest 2014 in Boston, Codefest 2015 in Dublin, Codefest 2016 in Orlando, Codefest 2017 in Prague, and GCCBOSC Collaboration Fest 2018 in Portland.
Contents
Objectives
Anyone interested in contributing to open source bioinformatics projects is encouraged to attend. Newcomers are especially encouraged to attend. The goal of many collaborative work events is to produce code, period.
CoFest's goals are much wider:
- Grow and foster the contributor community for open source bioinformatics projects.
- Extend, enhance, and otherwise improve open source bioinformatics code.
- Create, extend, and otherwise improve non-code objects, such as documentation and training materials
Why attend
- For new members of the community: meet and learn with other open source programmers.
- For current community members: expand your network and strengthen existing relationships. Teach and learn from new community members. Focus on open source work without interruptions. Discuss questions and problems in real time.
- For everyone: discuss and learn from the community. Teach others what you know. Build new friendships and collaborations.
What to expect
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation CoFest is a collaborative two-day working session. The only requirement for attendance is that you have an interest in open source software and solving scientific problems. We will have contributors to open source bioinformatics tools present to collaboratively work with, and we welcome new attendees who want to learn and contribute to open source code or documentation.
The rough structure of the two days is:
- Start with introductions from everyone attending about their goals and plans for the two days.
- Assemble into working groups based on shared interests like programming languages, open source projects or biological questions. We use the collaboratively brainstormed Google document as the basis for setting up groups. Attendees determine the goals for the two days. If you have an idea for a project, please add it before the event. Any and all suggestions are welcome.
- Work and discuss. Enjoy a productive time.
- We'll have regular breaks where each group can deliver short reports on their progress.
- We have informal lunches, dinners, and drinks as a way for everyone to get to know each other better.
- At the end of the two days, we summarize contributions and work accomplished in a meeting report.
Please feel free to get in touch with any of the organizers with questions. You are very welcome at CoFest.
Attending
You are very welcome to attend. There is no cost, we only ask you to register to help organize numbers. Please add yourself if you are interested to this Google spreadsheet We'll coordinate through the CoFest Gitter chat room and BOSC Gitter chat room, so please sign up and introduce yourself there.
If you're not able to physically attend, we're still more than happy to have you participate in Codefest. Please sign up on the the Google spreadsheet and list yourself as remote only. We have a CoFest Gitter chat room we can use to coordinate and discuss in real time and will have an open Google Hangout to make it easier to be part of CoFest remotely.
Add your project ideas to the shared google document. The ideas include smaller focused projects and larger work. We want suggestions from everyone and will organize into groups around these during CoFest.
Logistics
Location is going to be at The Swiss Innovation Hub for Personalized Medicine with the address: Hochbergerstrasse 60C, 4057 Basel, Switzerland.
Sponsors
We're looking for sponsors interested in being involved with the open source community. Sponsorship money helps provide food and drink for the CoFest and Open Bioinformatics Foundation Travel Fellowships for BOSC and CoFest. If interested, please get in touch with any of the organizers (CoFest) or the BOSC committee (general).
Questions?
If you have any questions or thoughts, please get in touch with any of the organizers directly, or join one or more of the aforementioned chat rooms to ask.
