Debian Med Sprint 2013 - February 23rd/24th in Kiel, Germany

Dear all,

We will have a Sprint again, and it is already two months from now,
on February 23rd and 24th in Kiel, Germany,
with the meeting's homepage on
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Kiel2013
as a reference. As for the last years the meeting is open to everyone with a strong interest in the packaging of software close to biomedical research and practice. This includes site admins and upstream developers alike. Whoever would like to come, please add your name to the list or send an email to Steffen to be added. Do not reserve rooms in Kiel yourselves, just tag your entry as in need of accomodation. A night will be below or equal to 50 Euros. We are negotiating still between a few places. Kiel is at the Baltic Sea, just north of Hamburg.

The Centre of Molecular Biosciences in Kiel migrated their Linux infrastructure to Ubuntu just a few months ago. And when asked, André and Ingo immediately volunteered to host our next Sprint, and more importantly, they happily grant us insights to their impressive robotics and software infrastructure, seeking ways to collaborate with (as a part of) us to foster and disseminate their developments and workflows in general: Genome - Proteome - Interactome - you name it. Kiel is also home to SciEngines, the FPGA company who gave us the tutorial last year. For them, as they are mostly Electroengineers, this meeting of ours is important to help understanding this Open Source at a deeper-than-intellectual level. They'll be attending in larger numbers and we get some hands on experiences. Let us see if we get their command-line-BLAST-compatibility shift a bit from the mere sequence analyses (as much as they may be needed there) more into the realms of structural biology - curious.

Our last year was successful, and that also because of our past Sprints, with a completely smooth interaction with other distributions. Tim of BioLinux for instance directly feeds back all issues he encounters. We can possibly also mention in this context the DebianMed PPA for Ubuntu users. We have Laszlo of PredictProtein.org who helped enormously - with his packages and his local spreading of the distribution. We got a series of additional contributors to Debian Med. Some are part of the upstream development teams, which gives some particular strength to our distribution. Also, the long-standing contributors have become Debian Mentors or even already Debian Developers. And fascinatingly, the Medical Informatics side of Debian Med, which gave us our name, has grown significantly and would be well worth another Sprint in 2013. We should look back a bit, celebrate, and look forward, to overcome the one or other still weakish spot of ours and think ahead.

So, we hope you all to find some time in late February and just sign up. Debian helps with travel for up to four of its Developers / Maintainers. Many thanks for that. Anybody reading this with some interest to help volunteers with an extra travel fellowship, please get in contact with us.

Hoping to meet many of yours in Kiel, in the name of all the helping hands for this meeting

Andreas and Steffen