NextGenBUG 62 (April 2021): THANKS!

[Donald Dunbar]

Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who joined Friday's NextGenBUG meeting. It was great to get the ball rolling again and it looks like there's good enthusiasm to keep going. Also great to see a few well known and new faces after the hiatus.

Many thanks to Mark, Pete, Catalina, Bas, Daniel, and Javier for great talks!!

A few people had to pop away early so here's a summary of the 'Future of NextGenBUG' chat.

• Daniel Barker suggested combining NextGenBUG activities with those of Edinburgh Bioinformatics. We've had one such meeting before and this seems sensible. Could do this with other SIGs too. 
• David Martin suggested extending to broader bioinformatics themes, including a session on teaching, and looking at something like becoming and ASCB chapter. 
• Peter Cock reminded is we've got the F1000 channel (https://f1000research.com/collections/nextgenbug). We'd urge people to share their slides if the can.
• Katie Emelianova suggested more, less formal events similar to the Codemonkeys sessions in Edinburgh. 
  
• Tim Booth and then Edward Wallace discussed funding. The NextGenBUG programme need not be expensive, but some funds would help. Edward suggested some of a small pot of money at ISSF3 may be available for an open science related bid. 
• There was talk of a Slack channel.

The next action on top of the above is to assign the organiser of the next meetign (or two) and suggest a time frame. Please have a look here (https://www.nextgenbug.org/contact) for the list of suggested contacts and let me know what to add/remove as needed. Hopefully we can get a rep from a dozen institutes. Then maybe a meeting in July/August?

Thanks again and all the best!!!

Donald