EU-Codefest 2014

OBF EU-Codefest 2014 will take place on September 18th and 19th, 2014 at the EBI in Hinxton, UK, just before the Genome Informatics Conference, which will be from September 21st to the 24th.

This is a great opportunity for open source bioinformatics developers to meet and work collaboratively. We hope to have developers from all the OpenBio, bioinformatics and scientific programming projects. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This is the second edition of the European OBF Codefest, the first one was held in 2012 in Italy.

Goals

The EU Codefest share the same goals as the OBF Codefest, which is usually organized along with the BOSC.

Since BOSC take place alternatively in the EU and USA, the EU Codefest was born two years ago to give the chance to EU based bioinformatics developers to attend, at least once per year, to an OBF Hackathon even when the BOSC is in the USA. Bioinformatics keeps growing and expanding rapidly and we believe that meeting once every two years for EU based developers is too much time. Having the chance to meet more regularly will in turn be extremely beneficial to strengthen our community, share ideas and start collaborating on new projects.

This event will be linked to the OBF Codefest, in fact we will coordinate with the group that will meet in the USA and hopefully the EU Codefest will be a continuation of the OBF Codefest work, with people having the chance to expand on existing projects and start new ones.

Programme

A detailed programme description is available on the EU Codefest page on the EBI website.

Please use the Cofefest Google Group to see latest discussions on topics and tools people are interested in coding during the event.

During the Codefest people are encouraged to work on FOSS projects. There will be a number of topics of focus:

1. The OpenBio projects development (BioPerl, BioPython, BioRuby, BioJava)
2. Semantic web technologies for biological data (e.g. RDF, OWL)
3. Software deployment and bioinformatics pipelines, including CloudBiolinux, Docker and GNU GUIX
4. NoSQL databases and NGS data mining
5. Biological data visualisation with e.g. D3/JS and BioJS.

If you have another topic of interest, please contact the organisers.

Registration

The Codefest will be hosted at the EBI Campus in Hinxton, close to Cambridge, UK

To register to the EU Codefest please use this link

Travel and Accommodation

On the EBI page you can find more information to reach the EBI Campus.

We expect attendees to stay in Cambridge and we are organising a shuttle bus from the city centre to the EBI campus for the two days of the Codefest. To facilitate the gathering and pick up, we advise attendees to book a room in one of the following hotels:

http://www.travelodge.co.uk/hotels/255/Cambridge-Central-hotel

http://www.travelodge.co.uk/hotels/577/Cambridge-Newmarket-Road-hotel

Of course you are free to stay in other places, these hotels are just recommended as they are closer to the city centre and quite cheap.

Sponsors

Organizers

• Francesco Strozzi
• James Malone
• Raoul Bonnal
• Pjotr Prins