[OBF] BOSC 2010 Request for Input

[Kam Dahlquist]

Dear O|B|F Member,

BOSC 2010 is currently in the planning stages. It will be held for 2 days 
in conjunction with the 18th Annual International Conference on Intelligent 
Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2010) in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. 
The dates of BOSC 2010 are July 9-10; the main ISMB Conference runs July 
11-13, 2010.  The BOSC 2010 web site can be accessed 
here:  http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/BOSC_2010.

The BOSC organizing committee is writing you to solicit input on the 
planning of BOSC 2010 so that we can make it a successful and productive 
conference for the O|B|F community.  You may respond with your suggestions 
to this e-mail or add suggestions to the BOSC 2010 talk/discussion wiki 
page at: http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Talk:BOSC_2010.  Please respond to 
any or all of the questions below:

1.  For the last several years BOSC has consisted mainly of one or two 
keynote presentations, other talks chosen from among the submitted 
abstracts organized into sessions by topic, updates from the Bio* projects, 
Lightning Talks, and informal Birds of a Feather sessions.  Would you 
rather see BOSC continue in this fashion, or would you support changing the 
format to one or all of the following:

--Tutorials where there were in depth demonstrations and code tutorials. 
This could be lead off by the OBF projects instead of the traditional 
update talks, but could feature any open source projects interested. These 
would be hands on sessions with real code examples, with a focus on 
teaching people how to leverage various code bases to make real life work 
easier.  Would you be willing to organize/lead such a session for your project?

--Discussion following the hands on tutorials, these would be interactive 
sessions focused around dealing with unsolved issues. The "speaker" would 
be responsible for setting up a set of discussion topics around an issue of 
interest, and then facilitating ideas and opinions from the attendees. The 
goals would be to talk through problems and gather a consensus about 
options for solving them.  Would you be willing to organize/lead such a 
session for your project?

--Mini-hackathon either before, during, or after the 2-day BOSC.  The 
subject of the hackathon would need to be organized by the individual 
project leaders/teams.  Some suggestions would be adding/extending support 
for next-gen sequencing; organizing bugs/tasks so that new beginners can 
start contributing to the project easily and working on some of those 
bugs/tasks; organizing some type of contest like the Genome Annotation 
Assessment Project (GASP) where solutions from different projects compete 
on arriving at some type of goal.  Would you be willing to organize/lead 
this type of session?

--Organizing/creating a LiveCD or Debian download of Bio* projects with 
documentation to support outreach to the larger bioinformatics 
community.  Would you be willing to organize/lead this type of session?

--What session topics would you like to see represented for traditional talks?

--Who would you like to hear as a keynote speaker?

2.  The BOSC 2010 organizing committee is in discussion with an open access 
journal to publish a formal Proceedings for BOSC.  If you are planning on 
submitting an abstract for BOSC 2010, are you interested in submitting a 
more formal paper to the BOSC proceedings, given that as the author you 
would need to pay the page charges that could run between US$500-1000?  We 
are likely to move ahead with plans to have a proceedings, but it would be 
helpful to know how many submissions to expect.

3.  Call for volunteers.  Organizing tutorial/hackathons and such will only 
be possible if individuals step forward to lead these sessions.  Please let 
us know if you would be willing to serve in any capacity.  We also need 
volunteers to review abstracts for the more "traditional" sessions, please 
let us know if you are willing to do this as well.

Timeline:  We are planning on putting out the Call for Abstracts in 
mid-January.  To be on track, we would like to receive your input by 
Friday, January 8.  If you are willing to step forward to organize a 
tutorial/discussion/hackathon, you would need to commit by that time, 
although there would still be some more time to put the actual program 
together in the new year.

Thanks and Happy Holidays!

Kam Dahlquist
Chair, BOSC 2010

on behalf of the BOSC 2010 Organizing committee:

Brad Chapman
Michael Heur
Darin London
Anton Nekrutenko
Steffen Moeller
Jim Procter

And the O|B|F Board

Chris Dagdigian
Nomi Harris
Hilmar Lapp
Jason Stajich