We recently started to standardise/structure the information about Bio-IT past training courses. To this aim, we are classifying the past training activities according to a standard ontology described here. The working folder for the classification effort is linked here. In parallel, we aim at collecting and presenting in a structured way all the training materials that are available in our GitLab “Bio-IT workshops” group, in the OwnCloud, in or linked by our website, or even available from the instructors webpages and repositories.

In the context of the Bio-IT Git Week, we developed a lesson called “Building Websites with GitLab”. The lesson, borrowed inspiration from The Carpentries model and includes hands-on exercises on how to host web pages on GitLab, starting from HTML files, Markdown or reStructuredText. The lesson goes through all the basic steps to build three template projects: A GitLab pages template based on plain HTML, featuring an example on how to embed a presentation and a video in the webpage.

The Bio-IT bot is a Mattermost chat bot written in Python using the mmpy_bot framework. The bot primarily supports Bio-IT activities with notifications, automation and other functionalities of relevance to the community. You can find technical and user documentation about the bot on the GitLab Pages Bio-IT bot website, including a list of issues that represent ideas for its development. Some examples are: Develop a guide for configuring notifications in a channel (RSS feeds are already available) and provide examples of its usage, including notifications for new papers from Pubmed given a set of search keywords Twitter events from channels or groups focused on open science or computational activities Include games/trivia support.

Bio-IT website needs some restyling! In parallel with other activities such as restructuring the way users can navigate our training offer, we will discuss about how to make the website: Mobile friendly, with all VPN-only pages tagged to support navigation from outside EMBL; More user (and especially newcomers) friendly, with different sections clearly marked, more audio-visuals, improved accessibility; Including the page(s) to navigate the training offer, both in terms of past and future events and of training materials.