As Europe experienced a record-breaking heat wave, BOSC 2019 attendees stayed cool in the Basel Congress Center (and many took breaks by floating down the Rhine). This was the 20th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, a meeting held as one of more than a dozen ‘Communities of Special Interest’ (COSIs) at ISMB, the flagship meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology. (In 2018, BOSC partnered with the Galaxy Community Conference in GCCBOSC2018.)

BOSC is organized by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), a non-profit, volunteer-run group that promotes open source software development and open science within the biological research community. The BOSC organizing committee ( Figure 1) works year-round to plan the annual meeting.

BOSC 2019 took place July 24–25, the last two days of the four-day ISMB/ECCB conference. The two-day meeting ( Figure 2) included a total of 46 talks and 55 posters, as well as eight self-organized Birds of a Feather interest groups ( Figure 3). During the meeting, attendees generated over 1500 tweets mentioning #BOSC2019 (you can find them in JSON format here).

The meeting opened with chair Nomi Harris noting that over its 20 years of history, BOSC has been held in 12 different countries, 6 US states and 2 Canadian provinces. BOSC co-chair Heather Wiencko followed these remarks with details about the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, BOSC’s parent organization, and Kai Blin discussed the OBF’s participation in Google Summer of Code.

The talks at BOSC were, as usual, organized into topic-based sessions, which included four recurring topic sessions:

This year, BOSC added four new sessions to the program:

Two of the new sessions, Data crunching and Data modeling and formats, discussed different aspects of working with data: representing it, storing it, analyzing it, and sharing it, all in the context of open source software and open data. The new Containers session discussed the use of containers such as Docker for enabling reproducible run-anywhere analyses. The popular Workflows session covered tools and metrics for CWL, the workflow language that was germinated during BOSC 2014, as well as other workflow systems. The Building Open Source Communities session (a new session that shares a familiar acronym with our conference) was devoted to efforts in open source and open science that go beyond software; for example, there were talks about training efforts, social networking in science, and ways to promote diversity and inclusivity in open source communities.

The two days after BOSC, about 50 people participated in the OBF-run CollaborationFest (CoFest for short), an event at which participants work together to contribute to open source bioinformatics software, documentation, training materials, and use cases. Organized by Alexander Peltzer, Michael Heuer, Peter Cock, and Bastian Rieck, CoFest 2019 was held at DayOne, The Swiss Innovation Hub for Personalized Medicine in Basel ( Figure 5). Participants worked together to fix bugs, add new features, write tests, and improve documentation in new and ongoing projects including Biopython, Common Workflow Language (CWL), Nextflow, Cannoli, CodeCite, the Synthetic Sequence Data Project, and the OBF’s affiliated project policy.

BOSC 2019 closed with an announcement: next year’s meeting will be held in collaboration with Galaxy’s Community Conference as the Bioinformatics Community Conference ( BCC2020), which will take place in Toronto, Canada, July 19–22, 2020. BCC2020 will include a training day, the main two-day conference, two CoFest days, and two additional optional CoFest Encore days.