I was thinking, that it could be a nice event to finally meet some other Biostars in person, maybe in the form of a little conference, meeting, or hackathon, and discuss further development, future directions, policies, hot topics, and what not. What do you think?
I would love to have a gathering of sorts, alas our greatest challenge may be that are that we are so spread around the globe.
When I talk to people about the Biostar userbase I walk them through the first page of the top users and tell about their location. Just see for yourself how many countries that covers.
We had some attempts to organize a Biostar get-together at existing conferences but those were tricky to get a lot of people to be present because one would already need to be attending these and many have non-trivial registration costs.
I don't know how many of you will be interested, but for me it's definitely worth of trying!
Funny enough, I have got several Biostars in my institution, but I don't know most of them personally!!!
Hi, I think it would be nice to have it as part of national meetings. In Ireland we already have regular informal meetings between bioinformatics people working in Ireland: http://www.gen.tcd.ie/vibe/
Personally I put a lot of value in physically meeting up and I think encouraging people to use biostars.org would be a great focus for a short meeting. Perhaps putting in for a SIG for the next ISMB would make sense?
I did Biostars At Ismb 2012 (Lbc) when I was going to ISMB last summer, but it kinda fell through due to other commitments...
Having it on national level is great idea! For Spain/Portugal it could be part of Jornadas de Bioinformatica (http://jbi2012.org)
We could try having another social get-together at ISMB in Berlin in a couple of weeks. I'll be there. There's usually an "official" welcoming dinner at ISMB; if nothing else, BIOSTARS could at least agree to move to the same side of the room at some specified time, like a little bioinformatics flash mob.
It always seems like a small subset of us are at a meeting at any given time, but I guess the question would be to plan to convene at an existing meeting for a day or two (PAG USA, PAG Asia, European Genomics Meeting?) or to plan our own meeting?
Well, what about having a large online meeting (conference, hackaton, whatever) first? I appreciate the idea of meeting in person (and I'd love to attend), but the level of success of the online meeting would actually indicate what can we expect (or what not to expect) from a meeting in RL. This is actually what I miss from the most of online communities - being able to show a strength online in coordinated, not distributed manner.
As a novice BioStar, I would be incredibly interested in this! I agree that an online meeting of sorts would be a good first step. I know there are a good number of BioStars in the Cambridge, MA area, so a meetup here would definitely be quite feasible :)
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If someone has suggestions for a good destination city - should be a major flight hub and easy to reach - put it forth. We have some funds from a grant that could pay for some costs (like reserving a conference room).
Why cant we try a Google Hangout and webinar series ?