Minutes:2007 BOSC Meeting

An initial agenda for this meeting was compiled by the President prior to the meeting.

O|B|F Board of Directors Meeting 7/21/2007: Minutes

Venue: Cafe Prückl, Vienna
Date: 7/21/2007, 5.30pm
Attending: Jason Stajich (OBF President), Hilmar Lapp (OBF Parliamentarian), Darin London, Kam Dahlquist

BOSC

• Had 94 attendees registered specifically for BOSC as of July 9th
• Do we have an audience? Is there a niche that BOSC continues to fill? The numbers seem to speak a clear voice.
• Show-and-tell was received positively, but didn’t play as big a role anymore
• Want to continue running the conference
• Venue:
  • Seems much favorable to associate with an existing major event
  • One model could be to associate with different events on an alternating basis, such as IMSB every other year and a different conference every other year
• Need a new Organizing Committee, several people volunteered to help organizing
  • Committee should decide on sessions, timetable, outreach venues
  • Session chairs who are also charged to identify the most desirable speakers
  • Should have budget to reimburse travel for key speakers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to come
  • Need to look into venue and procedure for publishing the talks
  • Include a hackathon?

Action items:

• Darin to craft on-line feedback survey for BOSC
• Darin to draft initial call for nomination to the BOSC Organizing Committee (BOC)
• Darin to collate required responsibilities for the BOC in the run up to the conference

Open-Bio Board

• Membership of the BOD
  • Current members are technically Jason Stajich, Chris Dagdigian, Andrew Dalke, Ewan Birney, Hilmar Lapp
  • Steven Brenner resigned in 2006.
• Financial report:
  • Have $15k in the bank.
  • Have not filed a tax report since incorporation.
  • Need to hire an accountant (for filing tax reports), lawyer (re-incorporate).
  • (Paste points from Chris’ letter here)

Mission of the organization

• Want do continue what we do right now, i.e., infrastructure support for the projects
  • Should ask project leaders for what they need
• Should we take a more active role?
  • Public opinion forming on open source software?
  • Should be present at the open-source panel
  • Outreach and education?
• Advertising and outreach for BOSC is also advertising for OBF
  • Makes us appear on people’s minds, something that people want to be a part of
  • Regular letters about news of BOSC
  • OBF official blog?
• Community building:
  • Creating ways for people to reach others
  • Providing a forum for people to engage in discourse about how to advance the state of open source in bioinformatics
  • Connect possibly “competing” projects to make an attempt at advancing the quality and availability of software
  • Coordinate meet-ups of people at other events (other than BOSC)
  • Must not be exclusive or ideologic
• Create a year-long plan leading up to BOSC 2008
  • Generate excitement
  • Need mechanism to identify who is currently on the board
  • Need mechanism to identify those who aren’t contributing, and remove them from board
  • Need to identify new treasurer
  • Need to identify candidates who would like to serve on the board
  • Revitalize and reform the board

Action items:

• Jason to identify a lawyer
• Jason to investigate and identify mailing address
• Will hold follow-up conference call (phone or skype or IRC) in August