Hello, I read Christian's email preparing for Debian Science sprint and this got my head somewhat reeling, thinking about what we should do with the upcoming Debian Med Sprints - and with us.
For Debian Med, I tend to think that with not too much of an extra effort we could turn the event into a Debian Mini-Conf with mini-Sprints (BoFs) attached. I am just not completely convinced that we want to grow, really. It would however grant the possibility to combine the development of the packaging with the development of users, i.e. the training and it is a good experience for everyone involved - not only academics sit in ivory towers, the industry folks only have a slightly different material (platin?). Let alone what one pays for a training on workflows at other places, say in NGS, this should truly get everyone hooked. And our events by now are known to be rather intense, I presume. Just all please play with this thought ["spielt mit den Gedanken" in German :o) ] for a while and come back with ideas for a format that may possibly give * incentives for ambitious folks with MacOSX as their desktop to join a Debian event (this is a metaphor, I know quite some of your are using MacOSX, but not too many know this to be common ... ) * bring the contributors to the packaging a bit more intot he limelight - as in to get ideas on what to do post the post-doc :) * have the training organised as a global tour? One or two per continent? No, we cannot do that for free, and this less about Debian but more of a Science-Transfer (which is why I personally do all that Debian stuff in the first place, though) but we could possibly join up (or be adopted by) another institution for the training. If any such training would aim more at IT folks than at biologists, say administrators asked to run a set of workflows, then this should be of immediate benefit for our distribution. I still need more of a plan for the wet-lab folks, still, for whom this is all not so super-easy these days. I am somewhat waiting for the Common Workflow Language to then discuss protocols which is relevant to everyone. I am notcertain about the deadlines for the next ISMB. But presuming that we could organise a booth over there explaining who we are and what we do and what we can do for others, I would be not be surprised for such international invitations to training sessions to happen. And I personally think that these would be good to happen. Best, Steffen
