[Announcement] Charting the Future: SBOL's Roadmap Ahead

[Prashant Vaidyanathan]

Dear SBOL Community Members,

As the newly appointed chair of the SBOL community, I'd like to extend a heartfelt greeting to each one of you. The passion, dedication, and hard work that this community pours into advancing synthetic biology standards is commendable, and I'm honoured to be a part of this journey.

Our community has achieved significant milestones, from refining data models to enhancing interoperability in synthetic biology tools. As we look forward, there are exciting opportunities and challenges ahead, which I'd love for us to tackle collectively. In the last 3 months, the SBOL editors, steering committee, and I have met often to identify key challenges and areas to focus for the next 2 years. Today, I'd like to share some of these ideas and invite you to contribute your thoughts and feedback, and urge that you participate in shaping our future.

The Roadmap:

• Broadening Our Horizon: Exploring new realms within synthetic biology, both within Academia and the Industry, where SBOL can make a profound impact.
• Strengthening Current Foundations: We have a versatile and powerful data standard. We need to focus on reducing the entry barrier for SBOL, making it more accessible and easy to use for the entire community, while we continue our efforts to improve the existing standard based on real-world use-cases and feedback.
• Building Bridges: Collaborating with related initiatives and standard bodies to ensure seamless interoperability.

Key Initiatives:

• Boosting Community Engagement: We are planning on introducing a few portals and dashboards to allow members to showcase their projects, share experiences, and brainstorm collaborative opportunities. We plan on starting with 2 such portals/dashboards:
• An SBOL projects portal - a place to highlight ongoing projects and tasks where we'd like the community's help.
• An SBOL Visual Gallery - a portal to showcase SBOL visual examples.
• Enhancing Accessibility: The vision is to curate beginner-friendly resources, ranging from interactive tutorials to detailed use-case documentation, ensuring that both newcomers and veterans find value. Our action items include:
1. Curating the SBOL examples repository and SynBioHub - with the aim to ensure researchers and practitioners have ample examples to get started with SBOL and a platform to store, share, and publish their designs. We're also working on establishing Jupyter notebooks and Google Colab spaces filled with SBOL examples, providing beginners with comprehensive resources to ease their introduction to SBOL.
2. Increasing our diversity and inclusion efforts - with the goal of increasing diversity in the SBOL governance groups and ensuring that every member has a voice in our community. A detailed outline of our plans will follow soon.
3. Expanding the scope of dedicated sessions at community events and conferences like IWBDA, Combine, and Harmony to ensure that all documents, libraries, and examples are up-to-date. For instance, when a new version of SBOL is released, we would like to work towards ensuring that all libraries and examples are updated in line with the latest version.

Your insights, feedback, and active participation are invaluable. We've set up a dedicated slack channel for you to share your thoughts on our roadmap and proposed initiatives. Your voice matters, and we genuinely want to hear it.As we embark on this promising journey, I urge you to actively participate in our upcoming events, contribute to discussions, and collaborate with fellow members. Together, we can shape the future of standards in synthetic biology using SBOL.As I write this, I'd like to extend a special thanks to our SBOL editors Lukas Buecherl, Tom Mitchell, Georgie Sørensen, Carolus Vitalis, Gonzalo Vidal, and our Steering committee members Jake Beal, Thomas Gorochowski, Chris Myers, Tim Rudge for their tireless efforts, and their contributions towards shaping this roadmap. I also want to thank you for your dedication and commitment. I am thrilled about the prospects that lie ahead for SBOL and am confident that with our collective effort, we will continue to make great strides.

Best regards,

Prashant Vaidyanathan

SBOL Chair

P.S. Mark your calendars for the two upcoming SBOL events!

• SBOL Workshops at IWBDA (September 11th 2023). You can RSVP using this link and can find additional details about Bio Design Week and IWBDA here.
• SBOL at Combine 2023! Details for breakout sessions will be sent once we finalise timings and slots.