Ever since it’s launch in 2017, EMBL’s Bio-IT chat has been steadily growing in all directions, expanding the range of topics discussed, the number of daily active users and different functionalities, some fun, some productive. Since around this time last year, the chat has grown to have: over 1600 users of which 410 are active on a monthly basis 700 channels split between 120 public and 580 private 1.5 million posts, which is to say, half million exchanged messages since last year a little over 820 board cards, thanks to the adoption of the new Task Management Boards feature introduced last year With such fast growth and many places to visit, it is normal to find yourself a little lost.

Hello hello everyone! This time around we come to you with different kind of announcement. Thanks to efforts from Federico Marotta, and contributions from Sarah Schulz, we now have a Trivia channel where you can have a little fun and test your scientific and general knowledge. Currently, there will be a trivia session every Thursday at 17:00, but if you are eager to test your knowledge, you are also welcome to issue a trivia start request at any time and a new trivia round will be started for you.

Following the feedback we obtained from all of you, we have decided to replace Mattermost, powering https://chat.embl.org, with an older technology, called IRC, following after the successful example of other communities. We hope that with this change you won’t have to deal with the burden of finding the right emoji and meme for every occasion. You will also be able to invite your oldies if /join #channel and /me commands are too unfamiliar or confusing.

Bio-IT EMBL chat reached 1M posts EMBL’s Bio-IT chat, initiated in 2017 to facilitate internal real-time interactions between people at EMBL, has reached the milestone of 1.000.000 posts in the first days of February 2022. At close to 5 years of service, and after a significant increase in adoption in the early days of the pandemic, the EMBL chat is now a very active platform with close to 600 channels and a daily exchange of over 2000 messages from over 330 active users.

Over the years, the Bio-IT EMBL Chat has seen an ever increasing list of cute and bouncy happy emoji, dancing cats, parrots, blobs and memes. We are always delighted to see how people customize the space to feel more fun and cheerful and so, to celebrate and recognize this contribution, we have created the Happiness enhancer badge that will be granted to our most active emoji creators: We love to see how you make this place so lively!

Initially proposed as an EMBL’s coding club collaborative programming project, the EMBL Bio-IT chat bot, avidly named BIT, took off in 2020 and is already diligently announcing courses and workshops in the Bio-IT-announce channel. Introducing BIT With a modular design, allowing for anyone to contribute new behavior with very little code, BIT, EMBL’s Bio-IT chat bot, is slowly gaining new abilities and showing its usefulness. As of 2021 it already assists EMBL’s Git admin team on specific administrative tasks and monitors EMBL and Bio-IT services keeping us up to date with changes.

EMBL’s (Bio-IT) chat has been initiated in 2017 to facilitate internal real-time interactions between people at EMBL, to promote group discussions and sharing of information. As of 2021 more than 1000 users are registered with over 120 active daily. In part due to the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic situation, the platform gained particular relevance and became a central hub for communication between members of all EMBL sites. The platform effectively became a pan-EMBL service in 2021, welcoming EMBL-EBI, that would join all other EMBL sites.

This quick tutorial shows you how to connect GitLab at EMBL with a Slack workspace. This can be very useful when you want to stay informed about activities in your repository without having to check your emails all the time - in fact, you may decide to disable email notifications for the repository because Slack notifications are quicker to see, manage and act upon! This tutorial also shows you the power of so-called webhooks!

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.