Open Bioinformatics Foundation:

2014 Update & Some IntrospectionHilmar Lapp, President

BOSC 2014

What is the OBF?

• Umbrella organization for the Bio* projects (and EMBOSS)

• Non-profit, entirely volunteer-run

• Dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the life sciences.

What does OBF do?

• Sponsor and run BOSC and other community-nurturing initiatives

• Code Fests (and hackathons)

• Mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code

• Advocacy to promote Open Source and Open Science in bioinformatics

• Accepting and disbursing donations on behalf of member projects

• Managing assets on behalf of our member projects.

Chris Fields@cjfieldsU. Illinois Urbana-Champaign

O|B|F is governed by a Board of Directors

OBF is an SPI-associated project

You can donate tax-exempt to OBF

We use open and collaborative processes

Growing Community: Attaining and maintaining

OBF affiliation

What happened since BOSC 2013?

Board of Directors Elections

• Hilmar Lapp elected to a second term as President.

• Nomi Harris elected as Director at-large, second term on the Board

• Peter Cock elected as Secretary, second term on the Board

OBF is participating in the Google Summer of Code

• Eric Talevich (Biopython) & Raoul Bonnal (Bioruby) serve as admins

• 6 Students working in Biopython, Bioruby, Biohaskell, JSBML

• Promoting reciprocal inclusivity for umbrella organizations such as OBF

Moving hosting to Open Source Lab

• Commercial cloud hosting costs eat up a major part of our income.

• OSL has expressed interest in taking us on.

• Gathering the necessary information has been slow and painful.

• Hoping to get this completed in 2014.

Sustainability is hard, including for

organizations and communities

Sustaining professional systems with volunteers is

a challenge• OBF sysadmin work rests on the same

too few people with too little time.

• Hard to be professional with volunteer work.

• Other all-volunteer tech foundations have similar problems.

OBF is a membership organization. Or is it?

0

30

60

90

120

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

MembersFor perspective:•Biopython: 816 (346 on dev)•Bioperl-l: 978

Can you help us improve this?

What’s next?

• Improve our professionalism

• Increase what we do well. Divest of/partner for everything else.

• Partner with organizations well aligned with our mission and goals

• Identify the best ways to invest in our community

Connect with us

• Web: http://www.open-bio.org/

• Twitter: @obf_news

• GitHub: http://github.com/obf/

• News blog: http://news.open-bio.org/

• Join us as a member.