Bioprotocols Request for Information

[Daniel Bryce]

Dear Bioprotocols Community,

We are investigating avenues for community sustainability and would like to announce the first Bioprotocols Request For Information (RFI). We are issuing this RFI to solicit interest and capabilities in three main areas: (1) community administration, (2) standards specification and software libraries, and (3) laboratory pilot experiments. 

We will evaluate responses to the RFI to scope fundraising efforts, and develop tasks to be administered by the forthcoming Bioprotocols Foundation. The foundation will be hosted by Open Collective (https://opencollective.com), home to many household names in the open source world. Subject to fundraising, we intend to support several projects through Open Collective, with a focus upon developing features and performing demonstrations that help to grow the Bioprotocols Community.  While this RFI is not a request for proposals, we will use RFI responses in lieu of soliciting proposals to the greatest extent possible.  

We encourage responses that address, but are not limited to, the following topics (linked to Github issues, where applicable): 

•  Administration:
  
  • Oversee development tasks
  • Develop governance 
  • Promotion, Marketing
• Specification and Software:
  
  • Authoring:
    • PAML Editor improvement (https://bit.ly/3mJwjEb)
    • Protocol import
  • Data:
    • Linking/storing protocol execution and experimental data
    • Container and Labware support
    • Describing lab capabilities
    • Automation to assign to protocols
  • Protocol analysis: 
    • Time and cost (https://bit.ly/3tztglT)
  • Protocol Specialization: 
    
    • Map to robotic platforms (https://bit.ly/3NXuIqe)
      • Cloud laboratories
      • SiLA
      • OpenTrons
    • Emit to protocols.io (https://bit.ly/3OiFt6g)
  • Protocol Expressivity: 
    • Constraints (https://bit.ly/39tvsEF) 
    • State (https://bit.ly/3tEYdoF)
    • Scoping (https://bit.ly/3MVQ2vd) 
    • Failure handling in authoring and execution
  • Standard:
    • Develop and publish official standard
    • Organize governance around evolving the standard
  • Experiments:
    • Mini prep (https://bit.ly/3OdlyWl)
    • Chemical manufacturing protocols
    • Micro-fluidics

Responses are limited to one page per task and should include:

• Point of Contact: Name, Affiliation, and Contact information.
  
• Description: A brief description of the task to be performed.
  
• Goal: The work products resulting from the task (e.g., software, data, documentation, manuscripts, etc.)
  
• Impact: A description of how successfully completing the task will support the Bioprotocols Foundation and potential users.
  
• Anticipated funding needed: Rough order of magnitude estimate in US dollars.
  
• Person hours: Total number of hours required to complete the task.
  
• Materials: List of materials and estimated costs (if applicable).
  
• Period of Performance: Estimate of the start and end dates.
  

We encourage responses prior to July 15th 2022, and will evaluate them on a rolling basis.  Responses should be emailed to: dbr...@sift.net.  We also encourage discussion through our slack channel #collab-bioprotocols at: https://bitsinbio.slack.com/archives/C02UJJ3AND8

Thank you for your interest in the Bioprotocols Community, and we look forward to seeing your submissions!

Sincerely,

Dan Bryce

Fellow

SIFT, LLC.

[Daniel Bryce]

Dear Bioprotocols Community,

I'd like to send this RFI again as a reminder that our deadline for responses is approaching on July 15th (just over a week).  Please reach out if you have any questions or would like to discuss possible topics.  We're looking forward to your great ideas!

Sincerely,

Dan Bryce