Abstract

During the past year, the Executive Board (EB) met regularly and held frequent meetings with the Operational Board via Skype. These meetings allowed discussion of a range of issues relating to the Project Committees (PCs), to EMBnet.journal, to the website, the Stichting accounts, membership, etc. In alternate months, we also endeavoured to convene Skype meetings open to the full EMBnet constituency; however, for larger numbers of attendees, technical issues continued to cause problems. Attempting to address these issues, we took the first steps towards evaluating the various tools and technologies available for online meetings, by creating a list of existing tools, and a protocol on how to test them. The test will be realised in the same spirit as the ‘ping project1' of the ‘80s. The 2013 AGM allowed us to convene a working group to discuss the issues in more detail, and to initiate a common experiment with different software and different Nodes. The ultimate goal is to write a white paper and to publish the results in EMBnet.journal. The last year has been both busy and productive, building substantially on the programme of work we outlined in 2010. In particular, working closely with Itico2 to improve the EMBnet ‘brand', we finally launched the new website, which now includes a new online fee-payment module for individual members. We call on all members to help augment the content of the new site and to help keep it up-to-date. Since the 2012 AGM in Uppsala, EMBnet's training strategy has been dominated by our leadership of GOBLET3 (the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training), which has been established as a Stichting, registered in the Netherlands, following the successful model of EMBnet. Working through GOBLET has significantly increased our level of interaction and cooperation with a range of major international societies and networks (including ISCB4, ASBCB5,ISB6, APBioNet7, SoIBio8, ABN9 and so on) - from the original 10 members who signed the Memorandum of Understanding to establish GOBLET, a further 16 organisations and several individuals have committed to join the Foundation. Another profound advance for EMBnet this year has been the final ratification of the new statutes, which were voted in during the Uppsala 2012 AGM - these statutes became legally binding in April 2013. The most significant result of the change is that we are now able formally to accept individual members (this allows, say, former Node managers to join, or any individual to participate in EMBnet's activities but whose organisation is not a member). Since ratification of the statutes, we have already had several membership applications, and welcomed one new organisation; new memberships will be processed without delay via the online payment system. The new statutes also ushered in changes to the internal structure of the organisation, obliging the PC Chairs and the EB to work together much more closely than they have done in the past; it has also allowed us to streamline the way in which EMBnet's activities

Published in

EMBnet.journal
2013, Volume: 19.1, pages: 24-25

SLU Authors

• Bongcam Rudloff, Erik

  • Department of Animal Biosciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Bioinformatics (Computational Biology)
Genetics and Breeding


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/44496