[BioPython] BOSC 2001 [Bioinformatics Open Source Conference]

[Brad Chapman]

Hey Andrew;

> I sent mail to bosc@bubbles saying that I was nominated
> as the biopython representative.

You are definitely on top of things. Quite a good choice for the
biopython representative! :-)
 
> I also sent some ideas on what I would like in a BOSC,
> but I sent them as my ideas and without input from what
> others here would like.
> 
> Here are my comments:
>  =================
> I would like a smaller and more technical conference.
> Last year's was more of a "Hello, we're X and we do Y"
> but as someone who follows most of the mailing lists
> I must admit it wasn't that new or thrilling.

I guess I agree with this (and the rest of your points) to some
extent. If you just take one goal of BOSC as: "building support 
and interest in open source bioinformatics projects", then I guess I
see two sub-goals:

1. Building the interest (and participation!) base, by letting more
people know about what is going on, and getting them excited about it.

2. Building the knowledge of people who are already into the projects, 
and allowing them to learn from each other.

BOSC 2000 did a great job of accomplishing the first goal in last
years conference. At least, it really got me interested in helping
more :-).

The second sub-goal seems to be what you are addressing, and I agree
that it's really important. But I think we want to accomplish this
without losing out on the first goal. Some concrete ideas to
help accomplish the second goal that come to mind are:

* Having computers and being able to have some time for the developers 
to hack on things together (Ewan already mentioned the possibility of
this).

* People presenting posters or talks on more "specific" areas of
projects. You did this last year by presenting on Martel, and there
are lots of things I would like to hear a talk or read a poster about
-- like the fuzzy location debates, etc. in Bioperl; the new
SequenceIO classes et al in Biojava...

* Having longer and more specific BOFs to allow people to have more
discussion time for topics.

* Having tutorials that encourage people to get more hands on with the 
code and ideas.

Of course, you can only do so much, but I'm sure that our wonderful
planning committee can get money and have time to get everything
together :-).

Only-looking-forward-to-ISMB-because-there's-gonna-be-a-BOSC-ly yours,

Brad