[MOBY-dev] [moby] Re: {Spam?} Re: The Agent behaviour - discussion and questions to the MOBY community

[Mark Wilkinson]

On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 13:05 -0600, Paul Gordon wrote: 
> I think our string of e-mails this morning proves just how valuable a 
> face to face meeting of MOBY developers can be


Indeed!  The barriers from my side have been two-fold.  

First, the latest MOBY funding award did not include any money for
conferences (though I did request it!). In the past I have supplemented
the face to face meetings out of the Genome Canada funding so that it
wouldn't be so expensive for people to attend.  I may be able to find a
way to fund the meetings, but I have to talk to the lead PI on the
Platform award.

Second, I have been trying to hire for the senior developer position for
quite a while.  I wanted to delay the meeting until this person was
hired, since they are going to more or less take-over the majority of ,y
own role in running the project day by day.  The first two candidates
have turned-down the position, sadly.  I have now identified a potential
candidate who I will be interviewing in a couple of weeks.  Hopefully
this will come to fruition!

The lack of funding for travel is also a barrier for my own attendance
at meetings.  The previous award had sufficient money for travel,
however the new award is intended to be "maintenance only", and travel
was not considered necessary for maintenance.

Anyway, I'll see if I can scrape-up some funding and/or get industrial
sponsorship to help defray the costs of a face-to-face MOBY meeting
sometime soon.  I'm supposed to be helping Jason Stajich in planning the
next BioHackathon, so we might be able to piggy-back on top of that
meeting?!?  

M






-- 
Mark Wilkinson
Asst. Professor, Dept. of Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics, iCAPTURE Centre
St. Paul's Hospital, Rm. 166, 1081 Burrard St.
Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6
tel: 604 682 2344 x62129
fax: 604 806 9274

"Since the point of a definition is to explain the meaning of a term to
   someone who is unfamiliar with its proper application, the use of
language that doesn't help such a person learn how to apply the term is
 pointless. Thus, "happiness is a warm puppy" may be a lovely thought,
                     but it is a lousy definition."
                                                                Köhler et al, 2006