Are you interested in learning new bioinformatics skills and contributing to open source projects in an inclusive and collaborative environment? 

Then you should consider joining CollaborationFest (CoFest for short): a free, two-day hybrid collaborative event that takes place right after the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC, July 13-14). 

CoFest is an opportunity to work together with other bioinformatics enthusiasts, from complete newcomers to grizzled veterans, to develop useful resources for the community. Importantly, it’s not just about coding, so you don’t have to be a programmer to participate; CoFest projects can also focus on documentation, training materials, and discussing challenging analysis problems and use cases. So everyone is welcome to contribute a different perspective and skillset.  

Personally, I’ve attended several previous CoFests and always had a great time: I met cool people, learned new skills (one year I learned how to run Nextflow in a Jupyter Notebook) and even made some modest contributions to open source bioinformatics. 10 out of 10 would recommend.

Sign up for CoFest today! It’s free!

This year’s CoFest is being planned as a virtual-first hybrid event, meaning the core planning is geared toward welcoming remote participants. There will also be an in-person gathering in Madison, Wisconsin (USA) if enough people express interest. 

So sign up for CoFest today by adding your name to this spreadsheet, and let the organizers know whether you’re interested in joining remotely or in-person.

Projects will be listed in this deck as people start proposing projects (which typically picks up steam as we get closer to the event). If you’d like to join someone else’s project, you can add yourself under “Interested participants” on the slide for any project you find interesting, or add a “contributor” slide to make yourself available for recruitment to a team. If you’d like to propose a project, feel free to add a “project” slide with a summary of your idea and what you hope to achieve. 

If you have any questions, you can reach out to CoFest organizer Thomas Schlapp by email at tschlapp@broadinstitute.org or on the OBF-BOSC community Slack.

Consider also attending the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference

If you’re not already familiar with BOSC itself, check out my blog post from last year that explains why it’s the absolute best annual bioinformatics conference. 

This year it is once again being run as a “Community of Special Interest” track, or COSI, as part of the ISMB/ECCB meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). The ISMB 2022 meeting is a hybrid event, with the in-person component located in Madison, Wisconsin (USA), running July 10-14. BOSC itself runs July 13-14.

Several of us Terrans will be there in person — teaching a Terra workshop, giving a talk about deciphering WDL workflows, hanging out in Birds of a Feather sessions and of course, participating in CoFest!

Calls for submissions are almost all closed (late poster abstracts are due today, 19 May) but there’s still time for you to register to attend the conference, either virtually or in person. Join us!