Hello Fourie, Terri, Michelle, and Peter, (and the Galaxy training community) The Galaxy training community has discussed what we would like to see in GOBLET in the coming year. I initially floated several ideas on the galaxy-training mailing list, and these were then modified and extended by the community. This email lists those items and includes some suggestions for implementing them. Fourie, we're handing these to you for presenting to the larger group. Peter van Heusden of SANBI will also be in attendance and can also speak from his experience within the Galaxy community. Many thanks for Hans-Rudolf Hotz and Björn Grüning for starting this conversation and contributing to it, and to Fourie for agreeing to represent GTN. If anyone has anything to add to the items below, please do so in the next day. Thanks, and have a great meeting, Dave C on behalf of the Galaxy Training Network *Five items we would like to see discussed are:* *1. Enable/Host online discussion about bioinformatics training.* We'd like GOBLET to host a mailing list or online forum for discussion of bioinformatics training issues. GOBLET has an announcements mailing list, but it would be a huge win if GOBLET hosted *the* place to discuss bioinformatics training issues. We argue this place list/forum be open to anyone, not just GOBLET members. Galaxy has had significant success with a Biostar based forum (but a mailing list would be great too.) *2. Either start sending a regular newsletter, or stop saying we have one.* Our preference is to start sending a regular newsletter, but that is effort and the payoff is uncertain. Having a newsletter does increase GOBLET's visibility and it also great for newcomers to see what is going on. (And having a better welcome for new GOBLETeers is one of our goals.) I prepare the monthly Galaxy Newsletters and this takes a little over a day of my time, every month. (But when I suggested to the Galaxy training list, that this might not be worth my time, I got pushback that it was worth my time.) *3. Should GOBLET offer a bioinformatics trainer certification?* GTN is in favor of a GOBLET Trainer badge as a way of both promoting GOBLET and as a way of saying "I've participated in GOBLET training" or "I'm GOBLET certified." Perhaps attendees at the just finished best practices workshop would be the first recipients? *4. Make it easier to publish, share, and refine training material.* (I'm channeling Björn Grüning here. Björn, please correct me if I go astray.) Software and Data Carpentry's model for training material is to use GitHub for version control, and to use Github's branching and merging capabilities to enable community editing of that training material. Right now GOBLET's (and GTN's) training material sharing is purely upload/download. It might be worth considering taking a hard look at how Carpentry does this and then support a similar model. Embracing this might lead to an explosion of collaboration on training material. It has been very successful for Software Carpentry The danger here is that the upload/download model is simple to use and easy to implement, and a Github based system would be a lot of work up front, and might not ever catch on. *5. Shared Training Datasets are Precious!* (Also channeling Björn here, although he never used the word "precious.") Given the difficulty and time required to create good datasets for training, it might be worthwhile for GOBLET to create a central repository for training datasets. This increases their visibility and usefulness, and also increases the visibility of the training dataset creators. Right now people can upload datasets of up to 50MB, which is good, but it would be great if there were some way to identify just training datasets, or training resources that include datasets. -- http://galaxyproject.org/ http://getgalaxy.org/ http://usegalaxy.org/ https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/