[Bioperl-l] Bioperl hackathon?

[Jon Orwant]

Right now, our (tentative!) thinking for the hackathon is close to
what you've proposed, Andrew.

Time: Three days -- Saturday January 26 through Monday January 28, so
it'll be prior to the conference proper, overlapping only on the
tutorial day.  We can probably get one large room (Nirav -- we're
discussing whether it'll be easier for our conference folks to have it
at the La Paloma, and/or whether to take you up on your generous offer
to have U of A help out.)

People: 15 developers.

Costs: we understand that it's a huge issue.  We'll be doing
everything we can to keep the costs for attendees to a minimum -- and
of course the notion of an admission charge for a hackathon is
ludicrous.  Nor, as Nat pointed out, will hackathon attendees have to
stay at the La Paloma.  There are far cheaper alternatives in Tucson.

Content: Ewan's suggestion sounds wonderful:

  (b) working with biojava/biopython on more interoperation/infrastructure
  stuff.

  In many ways I am keen on (b) - I think we sort of need one/two days with
  key bioperl/biojava/biopython people together working on the live code
  bases on the same machine. 

The key to a hackathon's success is having a good agenda and goals;
right now my thought is that the results of the hackathon could be 
presented to everyone at the conference, and that publicity would
attract even more people to your efforts.

We're trying to figure out how much we can afford to pay for the
hackathon, which in turn depends on whether we can get another sponsor
for the event to help defray our costs.  (Someone from our conference
staff will be in touch with you soon about the OBF, Chris.)

Anyway, Lorrie and I will know more soon, and we'll be in touch.
I'm glad to see all the enthusiasm!

-Jon

-- 
Jon Orwant, Ph.D.                     orwant @ oreilly.com
CTO, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.    http://www.oreilly.com
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