Hi all; This year the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) will be taking place in Vienna, Austria on July 15-16th. This is a yearly opportunity for open source bioinformatics developers to get together in person and discuss on-going projects. Nomi Harris, Peter Rice and the other organizing committee members are already hard at work planning for the conference: http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/BOSC_2011 The call for abstracts opens next Monday, and extends through April 18th, and we've been brainstorming potential session topics. This year we've tried to focus each of the sessions around a particular biological problem or computational approach. We hope this will draw some interesting parallels between work being done in different groups, and encourage even more collaboration. We are actively looking for community members who are interested in heading up the organization of a topic. The general idea is to build a cohesive set of talks within a session. How you'd like to do this is completely flexible but some of the ideas we've been discussing are: - Having a short introductory talk to provide an overview of an area, framing the different talks within this context. - Forgoing individual question/answer and instead combining this time into a longer panel-style discussion with all of the speakers. This would help stimulate back and forth between the different projects and the audience. If you are interested in a particular topic and would like to help with the organization, please send an e-mail to the BOSC mailing list: bosc@lists.open-bio.org. We're also open to new topic suggestions, and will look to add one or two more topics to our current list. Finally, there will be a two day coding session prior to BOSC as a follow up to last year's fun and productive Codefest: http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Codefest_2011 The Metalab, a unique hacker space in Vienna, has kindly agreed to host us for the two days. If you are at all interested, please add your name to the attendees list on the wiki. Since the Metalab organizers don't know us personally, we'd like to demonstrate there is interest and that we'll really show up with a bunch of bioinformatics hackers. More details will be in the works as the summer draws closer. Looking forward to the sound of music, Brad