• BOSC

BOSC/Organization

BOSC Organization Overview

ISCB Contacts

• Steven Leard: Stevem os the main liason between the BOSC Organizing committee, and the ISCB. He is actually not a member of the ISCB, but is contracted to be the liason. You can email him at any time with any question, and he will be able to get you the information, regardless of what it is. He is also the main contact for resolving financial reimbursements, etc. email: stevenleard@shaw.ca
• Hershel Safer: I am not really sure what is role is, or whether he works for Steven or ISCB. He will email you for some things, and he will attend the SIG Coordinators Post-Mortem Meeting. email: hsafer@alum.mit.edu
• BJ Morrison McKay: Executive Officer of ISCB. She will attend the Post-Mortem as well. email: admin@iscb.org

ISCB SIG Responsibilities

Official ISCB-SIG Relationship Document
Call for SIGS for BOSC 2007

Organizational Year

• Early to mid November?: Organize the BOSC organizing committee, and Abstract Review Board (these may overlap, but may not be the same). Start working out keynotes and other invited speakers, full talk venues, panels, etc. Invite keynotes and other invited speakers. It would be best to have something tentative from them before the SIG proposal is due.
• Early to mid December: the SIG proposal is due to the ISCB (see the BOSC 2007 page for example dates, etc.). Provisional acceptance is announced by early January. At the BOSC 2007 Post-Mortem, it was resolved that the ISCB would make the SIG review process more transparent, e.g. publish the names of the review board, and a formal definitiion of review requirements.
• Late December: Create the Official BOSC Website. This should contain information on keynotes, ISMB registration dates and fees, and all requirements for submission of abstracts, lightning talks, demos, or whatever venues are included in the upcoming conference, including the important requirements for open source licensing of all software, etc. It is a good idea to try to announce the results of reviewed proposals at least 1 week before the ISMB early registration discount deadline, so that those who are accepted will be able to register with the discount, if they need. Also, it gives those who submit proposals for software that isnt properly licesensed the chance to prove that they are licensed properly before the deadline. Somewhere in the page there should also be links to:
  • The Official ISMB site for the year
  • The ISMB Online Registration Link (when it is made available)
  • The Opensource.org website, and official list of licenses pages
• Imediately after the BOSC website is made public: Announce and call for abstracts/lightning-talks/etc. This should be This should be emailed out to all of the O|B|F mailing-lists. Recently I have just included a general statement, and a link to the Official OBF website for more information, instead of replicating what is in the site. I have always attempted to mail to multiple lists for the same O|B|F project, e.g. dev and announce, if it was possible. Each project has a mailman interface which you can find by appending the name of the list to http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/admindb/. You must get the password from Chris Dagdigian. This is useful for you to go in and ‘allow’ any BOSC announcements to these lists which get held in the moderator que when you are not a member of the list. Other lists will reject it outright, but you can respond to the reject email with a plea for help, and it will generally get taken care of by the official mailing list admin. The list of recipients can be expanded as needed. I have also set up the following (email me for the eventful.com ‘bosc’ user’s password):

  • BOSC Eventful Group

    This site provides an ICAL feed which will include all deadlines associated with BOSC 2007

  • BOSC Announcement Blog : This Blog will contain all Important BOSC announcements. You can include it in any RSS Reader.
• Second Call For Papers: This is to be done at least 2 weeks before the deadline.
• Review Submitted Proposals: This is done via email. Those on the review panel should discuss a ratings procedure (preferably before the deadline, although this hasnt happened in the past), and all proposals should be subjected to this procedure. Someone should collate the results, and notify the submitters according to whether they were accepted, accepted as a lightning talk, or rejected.
• Submit pdf file for printed ISMB BOSC material to be handed out. There is a Docbook formated document that I have been using to create this using docbook2pdf. These are available from http://people.genome.duke.edu/~londo003/bosc2007/program.
• Send out a reminder that we are still accepting lightning talks, and wifi-workshops.
• Run the conference.
• After the conference, there will be a meeting between the ISMB and SIG coordinators, usually Sunday or Monday. On some years, they have wanted the SIGs to present something to the ISMB attendees about the SIG.
• Meet with OBF board to discuss future plans.
• Get Presentation Slides and post to The Bosc Slideshare Account (note username is bosc, email darin for password, or just ask for it to be sent to the registered email address, which is bosc@open-bio.org, and then watch for it in the mailman admindb for bosc).