Open Bioinformatics Foundation:

A Community For, By, and Of YouHilmar Lapp, President

BOSC 2013

What is the OBF?

• Umbrella organization for the Bio* projects (and EMBOSS)

• Non-profit, entirely volunteer-run

• Dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the life sciences.

What does OBF do?

• Sponsor and run BOSC and other community-nurturing initiatives

• Code Fests (and hackathons)

• Mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code

• Advocacy to promote Open Source and Open Science in bioinformatics

• Accepting and disbursing donations on behalf of member projects

• Managing assets on behalf of our member projects.

OBF has members, and needs more

0

27.5

55

82.5

110

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

MembersComparison benchmarks:•Open-bio-l: 111•Biopython: 787 (331 on dev)•Bioperl-l: 1033

Can you help us improve this?

Chris Fields@cjfieldsU. Illinois Urbana-Champaign

O|B|F is governed by a Board of Directors

Creating an organization that people aspire to serve

• Mission and services that matter

• Processes that work

• Minimal administrative overhead

• Ability to accept tax-exempt donations

• Support for community initiatives

OBF is an SPI-associated project since Oct 2012

SPI Services

• Accepting donations and holding funds

• Holding substantial and intangible assets

• Signing contracts, including underwriting conference events

• Legal assistance (access to legal counsel)

• Technical services (e.g., nameservers)

You can donate tax-exempt to OBF

Including in Europe

Collaborative and transparent policy development

Growing Community: Attaining and maintaining

OBF affiliation

What’s next?

• Improve engagement and recruitment of volunteers

• Partner with organizations well aligned with our mission and goals

• Determine funding programs to best support our community

Connect with us

• Web: http://www.open-bio.org/

• Twitter: @obf_news

• GitHub: http://github.com/obf/

• News blog: http://news.open-bio.org/

• Join us as a member.