Before you leave
Be prepared and pack for temperatures as high as 92F (33C) and as low as 58F (14C). Expect a mix of sunshine and rain in the next week.

Getting to Bloomington
If you are flying into Indianapolis International Airport, there are two shuttle companies that provide transport to Bloomington:

  1. GO Express Travel

  2. Star of America Shuttle

See the online map for building locations.

Conference check-in
Please stop by the conference desk to pick up your badge, program, and other conference materials. You’ll need that badge to attend GCC2016 events. The conference desk will be open at these times:

  Fri     6–9:00pm, East Lounge, main level, Indiana Memorial Union (IMU)
  Sat    9am–9pm, Lobby, Wells Library
  Sun   8am–9pm, Conference Room, main level, IMU
  Mon  8am–6pm, Conference Room, main level, IMU
           6:45–9pm, Lobby, Cyberinfrastructure Building, during opening reception
  Tue   8am–6pm, Alumni Hall, first floor, IMU
  Wed  8am–6pm, Alumni Hall, first floor, IMU

See the online map for building locations.

Lodging check-in
The Indiana Memorial Union Biddle Hotel and Conference Center desk is open 24 hours. The Wilkie Residence Hall center desk is located in the North Building and is open 8am–midnight on weekdays and 10am–midnight on weekends. If you arrive after hours, please push the black button on the phone outside the residence hall. Punch in 6-4804 (will be posted by the phone) and the staff member on duty will come right down to help.

Upon check-in at either facility, you will receive a welcome letter that includes the conference/registration desk schedule and a few other details. For those arriving before Saturday, see the special Friday conference desk hours above, they are not listed in your welcome letter.

Parking is free at both the IMU (in designated parking lots) and at Wilkie in designated parking lots (request a parking pass for CH spots at the Wilkie center desk).

Be kind to your fellow attendees:
If you are staying at the IMU and don’t have a car, please ask for a parking permit anyway. Bring this permit with you to the conference check-in desk. We’ll offer the permits up to attendees who need parking but aren’t staying at the IMU.

Training: Required software
GCC2016 training starts on Sunday and continues on Monday. There are 31 sessions offered over the two days.  See your registration confirmation email for the training sessions you signed up for. Many of the training sessions require specific software installed on your laptop to fully participate in them.  

Practically every session requires a Wi-Fi enabled laptop with either Chrome or Firefox installed. If you don’t have either of these web browsers installed, please install at least one of them before training starts.

These Deploy and Develop sessions require that you have a running copy of the conference virtual machine (VM):    

• Writing and publishing Galaxy tools
  
• Introduction to Galaxy interactive environments
  
• Advanced topics in Galaxy tool development
  
• Advanced topics in Galaxy interactive environments
  
• Scripting Galaxy using the API and BioBlend
  
• BioinforMagic: Marrying Galaxy and Bioconductor

If you are participating in any of these sessions, please follow these directions to download and install the VM in VirtualBox. If you don’t already have VirtualBox on your laptop, you will need to install that too. Note that the VM is large (over 3GB). We encourage you to download the image before leaving for the conference, if at all possible.

A few other sessions also require some installed software. The instructors for these sessions will contact participants directly.

Training: Office hours
To help people get set up in advance, there will be a training office hour session the night before each day of training. Drop by if you want help installing and configuring required software, or just to check that everything is working. The two training office hours sessions will be

 Saturday, 7–10pm
 Sunday, 8:30–9:30pm

Both sessions will be in the Hoosier room on the main level of the IMU, which is just down the hall from where the training sessions will be held the following day. Our goal is to have everyone ready to go when the first training session starts each morning. And, if you are VM, VirtualBox, Docker, or generally systems proficient, think about stopping by and lending a hand.

Call for BoFs
Birds-of-a-feather (BoF) meetups are informal gatherings at GCC where attendees with a shared interest meet to discuss their interests and challenges. If you have an idea for a BoF, post it here. The conference will provide space and make sure that attendees get the word. BoFs will be added to the conference schedule website as they come in, and BoF meeting times will be assigned in the coming weeks. Last year's BoFs spanned a wide range of topics and were highly recommended in the conference evaluations. Let’s outdo ourselves again this year.

Announced BoFs
Three BoFs have already been added to the conference. Locations and times for these three will be set before training starts on Sunday.

  1. European Galaxy developer school

  2. Application containers for the win!

  3. GalaxyAdmins

Hackathons
Coding and data hackathons start on Saturday morning. Hackathon organizers will be in direct contact with you on Saturday and Sunday morning to let you know what to do in preparation for these events.

Sponsors
Conference sponsors are key partners in the Galaxy community and are absolutely vital in making event registration affordable. In acknowledgement, we are highlighting different sponsors in each email.

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The Bloomington Life Sciences Partnership (BLSP) is an economic development initiative that is part of a larger effort to attract innovation, cultivate entrepreneurship, and support business growth in the greater Bloomington region. The BLSP program, part of the Bloomington Economic Development Corporation (BEDC), is a non-profit initiative dedicated to improving the economic vitality of the region and fostering creativity, job growth, and better opportunities for all. If you have a startup idea, own a business, or are interested in supporting the growth of these things in Bloomington, please visit www.bloomingtonedc.com or call (812) 340-9058 to see how we can help.


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