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Please Donate

Through our fiscal sponsor, Software in the Public Interest, Inc., we accept charitable donations, including online by credit card. Donations made through SPI are 501(c)3 tax-exempt in the US. (SPI also has a charitable partner organization in Europe.) Your contribution helps O|B|F to fund activities towards maintaining, nurturing, and growing a vibrant community of people committed to developing reusable open-source software for advancing biological research.

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About Us

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F is a non-profit, volunteer-run group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community.

Our main activities are:

• Running and supporting the BOSC conferences.
• Organizing and supporting developer-centric "Hackathon" events.
• Participating in the Google Summer of Code program on behalf of our member projects as an umbrella mentoring organization.
• Managing servers, colocation facilities, bank account, domain names, and other assets for the benefit of our member projects.
• Public opinion and policy statements about matters related to Open Source and Open Science in bioinformatics.

As of October 12, 2012, the O|B|F is a Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) associated project.

• Our bylaws, with the changes approved on Sep 11, 2012.

History

O|B|F grew out of the volunteer projects BioPerl, BioJava and Biopython and was formally incorporated in 2001 in order to handle our modest requirements of hardware ownership, domain name management and funding for conferences and workshops. The Foundation does not participate directly in the development or structure of the open source work, but as the members of the foundation are drawn from our projects' developer communities, there is clear commonality of direction and purpose.

BOSC

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is held annually in conjunction with ISCB's meeting, ISMB.

BOSC 2013 will take place July 17-18, right before ISMB/ECCB 2013 in Berlin, Germany.