Hi All,

Here is my starting list for discussion about what GTN should promote at GOBLET this year.

1. Enable/Host online discussion about bioinformatics training.

They could use the BioStar platform, and this would give all bioinformatics trainers a platform to discuss questions.  I think BioStar has been a huge win for the Galaxy community.

2.  Embrace the Carpentry model for training material and training datasets

Software and Data Carpentry put all their training materials in GitHub where the trainer community can (and does) update the materials.  The Galaxy training materials hackathon earlier this month made significant progress on this very approach.

Open Questions:

A) Do we as a community believe that this is a worthwhile approach for training materials?

I'm pretty sure I speak for the Galaxy team when I say that we believe it is.  How do GTN members (and anyone on this mailing list) feel?  There was a lot of community participation in this month's contribution fest.

B) If we think it's a good approach, how can we argue it's good for GOBLET as well?

Something we could propose that gets GOBLET membership thinking, and doesn't require them to actually do anything until the following year:

Propose that GTN be a test case for this approach, and that we present our experience and whatever best practices we've learned at the 2017 GOBLET meeting.

3. We prepare short presentations on whatever points we decide to push. 

Maria could show these when making presenting GTN's arguments.  They would need to be short.

I could create one for the forum suggestion,  Björn, Bérenice, and myself could create one for the training materials proposal.

4. Should GTN stay in GOBLET?

We discussed this last year and decided to give it another year, which is now almost done.

Something that was supposed to happen, but that mostly did not, is that I would be a lot more active in GOBLET.  Besides passing on emails to this list, I don't think I did this.  So, 2016 may or may not have been our year to discover the greatness of GOBLET, but given my inactivity, we just don't know.

GOBLET still strikes me as having great potential that it just hasn't realized yet.  

The yearly membership is €250.  Last year this was paid by the Galaxy Community Fund.  If this group decides we should stay in GOBLET then I'll present a funding request to them for 2017.

No matter what we decide we should let GOBLET know that we had this discussion, and what points we came up with.


Thanks for reading this far,

Dave C