A lot has happened in the past few weeks, as everyone at EMBL has been adapting to working from home. It’s been a busy time for the Bio-IT community: as computational researchers and support staff, most of our community members are able to continue working on most of their normal tasks/research, the only major change being that they do that from home. Many such members are facing additional challenges, though, from struggling with reduced Internet connection speeds to balancing their work tasks with the need to care for children and other family members.

Restrictions are increasingly being rolled out with a view to slowing the spread of the novel Coronavirus. So far, the EMBL sites in Rome and Barcelona have been closed and our colleagues at those stations are having to find ways to work from home (where possible). Similarly, members at all other stations have been asked to work from home whenever they can, and in-person events both large and small are being cancelled to reduce the risk of viral transmission.

Post by Malvika Sharan on behalf of the Bio-IT Team To express our appreciation and gratitude for your contribution to the Bio-IT project and further support your involvement in such activities within and outside EMBL, we are launching the Bio-IT Outreach & Travel Fellowship program 2020. Any EMBL member who has actively led, facilitated, contributed to or participated in a Bio-IT event or project can request a fellowship of up to 500 Euros to attend or organise an event in 2020 by submitting an application.

By Malvika Sharan, a Community Outreach Coordinator of EMBL Bio-IT project. This post was originally written for the Software Sustainability Institute’s blog series. Let me start by saying that I am a positive person (generally speaking!). If you tell me about a disaster, I will try to find something positive in it. Having made that disclaimer, I can now safely say that I am a bit pessimistic too. Therefore, no matter how positive I am about my training and outreach events as a community manager, I am ready to fight the disaster that hasn’t occurred yet.

On 4 July 2019, we hosted the very first Bio-IT hackathon. We invited our community members from various research groups/departments a few months ahead of the event and asked them to think of projects that they could pitch for this hackathon. In order to provide a selection of topics, we encouraged project ideas ranging from developing technical tools to writing documents. We were successful at drawing 16 contributors from different research and non-research groups to participate in this event.

Post by Malvika Sharan. Written as a part of her participation at Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2019 supported by the Open Bionformatics Foundation (OBF) sponsors a Travel Fellowship program fellowship, this post first appeared on the Open Bionformatics Foundation (OBF) website. The phrase ‘water cooler effect’ is derived from informal gatherings and connections made around water coolers (or vending machines these days!) at the workplace or other formal situations. Such unplanned encounters lead to genuine connections between people resulting in meaningful and productive collaborations.

Dear Community Managers, Have you been working on multiple projects with multiple groups of people? Have you ever (or every day) felt like that you are not specialised enough? Then these next 90 seconds are for you (because I just lost 30 seconds introducing myself). You may think that you are less specialised than many in your community, but that’s mostly because you know too many people of specific expertise. Remember?

This post is the case study from my participation at the Mozilla Open Leaders Cohort 7 from January-May 2019 TLDR: I am collecting/sharing academic stories of my colleagues and friends (at EMBL, Bio-IT, Mozilla and other Open Communities). You are invited to contribute to this project by scheduling a meeting with me (use this link) to share your stories/ideas that you would like others to know. (See info on the official Mozilla page)

This post first appeared at Katja’s homepage Author: Katja Ovchinnikova Last week, I co-led a session on ally skills with Malvika Sharan, Sofya Mikhaleva and Paul Gerald Sanchez as a part of the Women’s Day at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. The concept of the ally skills training was originally developed by Valerie Aurora, a former Linux kernel developer. Valerie has designed extensive and well structured materials offering guidelines for learning and teaching how to step up and use our social advantages to support others in workplaces and communities.