Galaxy has a fantastic developer community, from the very active mailing lists and #galaxyproject IRC channel to individuals who have submitted literally hundreds of pull requests and patches.  We are always looking for ways to interact with existing community members and get even more people involved. To that end, we’re thrilled to officially announce the very first Galaxy Hackathon (http://bit.ly/gcc2014hack).  The hackathon will be a three day event taking place at Johns Hopkins immediately preceding GCC2014 from June 28th-30th.

Do you have a feature you've always wanted to implement?  Just want to hack on Galaxy (or Cloudman!) with other folks?  The Galaxy Hackathon will be a great opportunity to meet and work closely with other community and Galaxy Team members over the course of three days, culminating in some really great improvements and new features to show off at the Galaxy Community Conference afterward.

Participation in the hackathon itself is completely free, but there's limited space so if you're interested and would like to participate please go ahead and book both your lodging and hackathon seat at http://bit.ly/gcc2014hackreg.

To help organize ideas and people into more concrete projects, we've also set up a hackathon-specific Trello board that we'd love for everyone to go ahead and start using at https://trello.com/b/3YgU637b/gcc2014-hackathon.  The board is public and open to commentary and voting, but to create new cards you’ll need to be added as a member so please note the instructions on the board for that.

Finally, we are very happy to have Curoverse (https://curoverse.com) on board as the exclusive Peta level sponsor of the hackathon.  If you know of any other group that might be interested in sponsoring at the Giga level please let us know.

We hope to see you in June, and can't wait to see what we can accomplish!

-Dannon Baker on behalf of the GCC2014 Hackathon Organizing Committee