Link to non-profit organisations sharing our aims
Dear all,
to bring Debian Med (and ourselves with it) closer with upstream and their organisations,
I suggest to prepare a page with links to them. This would be too many to list them, I
presume, but how about the following two selection criteria:
* regional coverage - the world-wide ones plus one per continent
* those where contributors of Debian Med are members in, and the member should then be
named as a contact person
The above I would then cross-produce with the different fields we are gathering in Debian
Med, i.e. Bioinformatics, Medical Informatics, Image analysis, ... you name it. I would
prefer a solution on Blend-level for this, since this concern of mine (and of Debian Med
at large, I hope) in my perception is a general one. We could add the annual fees
associated with membership, at least for the OBF, which is free.
Here are those organisations that I would like to see added for Bioinformatics ... Charles
et al. certainly have some extra ones in mind:
ISCB - International Society for Computational Biology
http://www.iscb.org/
organises the ISMB conference and local conferences in Latin America and Africa.
Members in Debian Med: Steffen
Region: world-wide
OBF - Open Bioinformatics Foundation
http://open-bio.org
organises the annual BOSC (Bionformatics Open Source Conference) as a satellite
conference to the ISMB focusing on the strengthening of Free software in our field. It
hosts web sites for the Bio{Java,Perl,Python,SQL} libraries.
Members in Debian Med: Steffen
Region: world-wide
GI-BIOINF - Gesellschaft für Informatik, Fachgruppe Informatik in den Biowissenschaften
http://www.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/groups/fg402/
organises annual (mostly) english-spoken German Conference in Bioinforamtics
Members in Debian Med: Steffen
Region: de/at/ch
SPI - Software in the Public Interest
http://www.spi-inc.org/
A company existing only for the purpose of organising funds for Debian. Regional
cooperations help with saving transfer costs.
I feel rather good about such a page. Andreas? Internally, from what I observe, those
organisations are fairly loosely coupled, much like we are. I cannot tell about how many
more contributors Debian Med will achieve via those routes, at least there will be more
users. And particularly for the outreach to Africa and Latin America I am very much hoping
for the support of such organisations. What came to mind are tutorials at conferences with
travel paid by them (also good for key signing). Two years ago at BOSC we discussed the
collection of tutorials / summer school material by upstream that should go on some Live
CD as an extension to Debian. This effort then stalled but is revivable any time, it just
needs the right person to get the right kind of grant through. And we need then to make
sure that Debian is not understood as a competition to such an effort but perceived as a
regular medium to reach out. That is what all the funding agencies want to be certain of -
they want to make a difference - "through us" we should then not even need to shout any more.
Cheers,
Steffen
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