[Bioperl-l] Bioperl hackathon?

[Jon Orwant]

Due to some particularly nice encounters at the Open Source
convention, I've gotten fascinated by bioinformatics, and I'm trying
to help out with our upcoming bioinformatics conference (Jan. 28 to
Jan. 31 in Tucson).

We've got Lincoln Stein and Ewan Birney as two of our five keynotes
(the others being Gene Myers, Terry Gaasterland, and Jim Ostell),
which naturally raises the question: Should there be a bioperl
hackathon at the conference?  

I'm not thinking of talks where someone preaches the magic of bioperl
to the teeming masses -- we'll definitely have that.  What we were
thinking of was supporting the bioperl developers somehow.  This could
be as modest as a BoF session at night, or as grand as allocating a
meeting room for a day or two and providing a wireless network for you
to hack together.  If you'd be interested in that, send me mail.

Speaking for O'Reilly, we want to help you folks accomplish whatever
bizarre freak experiments you're up to -- but unlike other technical
areas, we don't have much in-house experience when it comes to
biology.  So what can we do to help?

Also, if there are particular topics other than bioperl that you'd
like to see at the conference, let me know and I'll forward them on to
Lorrie LeJeune (lorrie@oreilly.com), our program chair (and
bioinformatics editor, and artist behind the C. elegans drawing on the
cover of our bioinformatics book).  There's a call for participation at
http://conference.oreilly.com/biocon/cfp.html, although we'll probably
extend the proposal deadline until the end of August.  

Speaking of C. elegans, I've been trying to read up on bioinformatics,
and I have to say that this worm you seem to like so much is really
disappointing -- I hadn't realized until yesterday that it was just
1 mm long.  This is like learning that Tom Cruise is only 5'7".  

-- 
Jon Orwant, Ph.D.                     orwant @ oreilly.com
CTO, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.    http://www.oreilly.com
90 Sherman St, Cambridge MA 02140      (617) 354-5800 x599