Hello all,
As you may have heard, my work world was turned upside down, just a few hours after I sent this email.
In case you haven't heard, we have some very bad news: James Taylor, one of the founders and current PIs of the Galaxy Project, and my boss for 9+ years passed away on Thursday. We still don't know the details, but he was online and active as late as Tuesday afternoon. We are posting responses (and will post information, when we get it) here https://galaxyproject.org/news/2020-04-james-taylor/. OBF has posted a memoriam https://www.open-bio.org/2020/04/03/james-taylor-in-memoriam/ as well:
The whole Galaxy Community, including me, is shaky at the knees right now. We are also busy coping with the emotional and practical fallout of James's passing.
This means that the "By Monday" part of this email no longer holds. I am hoping to dedicate time to this again by the end of this coming week. I apologize to everyone who has already responded. I will aim to act on your input by the end of this coming week as well.
Stay well, stay safe, and give yourself a hug, Dave C
On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 5:28 PM Dave Clements clementsgalaxy@gmail.com wrote:
Hello all,
The organizers have settled several open questions related to BCC2020 going online, many of which affect training.
Please read this email through and respond as soon by the end of Monday to the linked form. Please treat this as semi-confidential. We won’t announce this information until next week.
Training Days Shifted
First, training has been shifted from
Saturday, July 18: 3 x 5 sessions, Training Day
Sunday, July 19: 1 x 3 sessions, First day of meeting
Monday, July 20: 1 x 3 sessions, 2nd day of meeting
to
Friday, July 17: Content originally on Saturday July 18
Saturday, July 18: Content originally on Sunday and Monday, July 19-20
The online meeting days (Sunday-Tuesday) will now be shorter.
BCC West and East, and your Time Zones
With the help of the Galaxy Australia we will be offering BCC online twice each day:
West / Toronto: Americas, Europe, and Africa
East / Australia: Asia, Australia, and Oceania
These windows will start exactly 12 hours apart, thus allowing us to cover the world.
We do not expect that the same instructors will be available for both windows. However, we still want to offer training in the East. Some possibilities:
- Offer same content with (mostly) different instructors:
We may be able to find instructors for existing topics in the Eastern half of the world. Instructors in the East may be able to help with sessions late in the Western window. Instructors in Western North America may be able to help in early Eastern sessions.
- Offer Different (or no) Content
However, those options aren’t going to work for every topic on the current schedule. We could fill openings with other content, or just have holes in the training schedules https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vZqf8KLWkntkgE-rRkHy0Ob5kXh2XPOgTkWcdmfzLnI/edit#gid=0
Online is just harder
Galaxy Australia has done extensive online training across their region, and they learned that online training can only cover ⅓ of the content as in person. Scale back training goals and content accordingly.
We are investigating how best to support online learning. We will provide and pay for online platforms (not sure which ones yet), and we will run practice sessions before BCC.
Registration
We will likely set up registration to enable people to sign up for individual sessions, and registration will be darn cheap. You will also need more TAs for online, and we will expand the number of conference supported instructors for each session.
What we need (hopefully by Monday)
Everything has changed, and we need to know if you are still interested, and what your requirements are. We also need suggestions for instructors for BCC East (and topics too).
Please provide your input by
Taking a look at the proposed training schedule https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vZqf8KLWkntkgE-rRkHy0Ob5kXh2XPOgTkWcdmfzLnI/edit#gid=0. Are you still willing to present these topics? Do these date / times work for you? Are you available to help in the other hemisphere? (Simon, I made some guesses on you.) Do you have ideas who could? 2.
Then tell us what you think https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfL_ZVxnDE6E2tGcabU9eoQQdf_edqEM8r43SneTv0BuU0mrQ/viewform. You can have one instructor per instructor group fill it out, or each instructor in your group can submit a separate response.
Thank you for reading this far,
Dave C