(This is a repost of a BLOG on Google Open Source news about Google’s open source student programs and software releases) One of our goals with GSoC is to inspire young developers to participate in open source development, hopefully continuing well beyond the summer.

Announcing the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2015: Holly Bik Dr Holly Bik is a Birmingham Fellow (assistant professor) in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. She obtained her Ph.D. in molecular phylogenetics at the University of Southampton, UK (working in conjunction with the Natural History Museum, London), followed by subsequent postdoctoral appointments at the Hubbard

Call for Abstracts for the 16th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2015), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB/ECCB 2015.

Last year’s Google Summer of Code 2014 was very productive for the OBF with six students working on Bio* and related bioinformatics projects. We applied to be part of GSoC 2015, but unfortunately this year were not accepted. Google’s program is enormously popular, and over-subscribed, meaning Google has had to rotate organisation membership. The OBF is grateful to have been accepted in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014.

In 2014, OBF had six students in the Google Summer of Code 2014™ (GSoC) program mentored under its umbrella of Bio* and related open-source bioinformatics community projects: Loris Cro (Bioruby) with mentors Francesco Strozzi and Raoul Bonnal; Evan Parker (Biopython) with mentors Wibowo Arindrarto and Peter Cock; Sarah Berkemer (BioHaskell) with mentors Christian Höner zu Siederdissen and Ketil Malde;

The BOSC 2015 Organizing Committee is pleased to welcome Sarah Hird as our new Outreach Coordinator. BOSC is eager to increase the participation of individuals and groups that have been historically underrepresented at our conferences, and Sarah will be spearheading this effort.

Dear Biopythoneers, Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.65 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4. It is also tested on PyPy 2.0 to 2.4, PyPy3 version 2,4, and Jython 2.7b2.

Agenda Venue: to be held by conference call on Nov 18, 2014, 12.30pm EST (17:30 UTC)

We have asked you, and you have spoken!

We’re pleased to publicly announce that we aim to video record all the talks at BOSC 2014, and the panel discussion, to be made freely available online after the conference. This is on an opt-out basis, and thus far none of our speakers have declined to be filmed. Last year we managed to record many of the talks - including both keynotes, which you can watch via the YouTube links on the BOSC 2013 Schedule.

This is a belated notice that the OBF mailing lists are down due to a server failure. Posting a tweet is easier than writing a blog post, please follow @OBF_news for updates. We have a complete back up and running as a virtual machine hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which should become live by Monday pending DNS updates etc.