Global Galaxy Steering Committee

Keywords: Strategic emphasis, medium and long term planning, international opportunities, community

Galaxy is a mature, successful research software infrastructure project, with a large and diverse global audience. Changes in project governance structures are needed to help adapt to increasing complexity.

The Galaxy Executive Board has formed the Global Galaxy Steering Committee (GGSC) to represent the interests of communities engaged with the project, and to implement efficient consultative project governance structures for that purpose.

News and Announcements

January 14, 2022

Call for (self) nomination - Want to learn more about how you can contribute to the GGSC?

The GGSC provides opportunities for community members willing to initiate and lead new community focussed initiatives. See this blog post for more details.

Community members who have ideas and strong feelings about one or more new projects that they would be willing to lead, or who would like to join existing working groups, please contact the Chair to discuss how the GGSC can help them achieve their goals.

September 14, 2021

New member

The GGSC is pleased to announce our latest member - welcome Sveinung Gundersen from ELIXIR Norway.

The Manifesto: Global Galaxy Steering Committee Charter

The GGSC will comprise collaborators from active Galaxy communities and will undertake consultation and projects to advance and sustain the interests of the community of communities now engaged with the project. Two major areas of activity are planned for the first year.

First, identify the range of common interests and roles shared by project participants in participating communities1. These are an increasingly important part of the project and are the primary issue for the Committee to consider. Our goal is to develop open governance processes that allow communities to contribute to priorities and project planning, so we will develop mechanisms supporting efficient, effective and inclusive representation.

Second, evaluate and explore the scientific social capital and discovery opportunities generated by these growing communities. Thousands of scientists from many different disciplines regularly sign on to a Galaxy service to analyse their data. As a result, they join a world wide community using a software framework that encourages collaborative sharing of training resources, tools, workflows and data. A shared analytic platform decreases technical friction, facilitating collaboration on discovery projects within and across disciplines. The tool library helps avoid substantial duplicative technical costs world-wide, as part of the growing social and economic value of this scientific research product. Our goal is to identify, prioritize and support activities that add value to this emergent resource, such as developing novel methods to integrate data across domains, communication mechanisms to support discovering and collaborating with other users, or novel application of standard methods from one domain to appropriate data from another.

See the Galaxy Governance Model for how the Steering Committee works with other parts of the community.

1 Such as project role (user, educator, system administrator, developer, learner, ..), scientific interest (Genomics, Natural Language Processing,..), institutional and professional affiliations and geographic time zone

Working Groups

These are the current GGSC working groups, similar to the technical working groups. They are open to interested community members willing to add their contribution. Please contact the committee member leading the project if you would like to learn more about participating in their work.

  • Membership - Dan Blankenberg
  • Misconceptions - Hans-Rudolf Hotz

Grown-up Working Groups

  • Mentoring - Bérénice Batut: This working group has developed into the Galaxy Mentor Network as part of the Outreachy internship program (mentees: Rahmot Afolabi, Chinonye Mildred, mentors: Bérénice Batut, Assunta DeSanto).
  • Small scale server administrators - Hans-Rudolf Hotz: This working group has become a community of practice.
  • Propeller onboarding cookbook - Anne Fouilloux: This working group has developed into the Galaxy starter kit as part of the Outreachy internship program (mentee: Maria Pia, mentors: Anne Fouilloux, Beatriz Serrano-Solano).

GGSC Committee Membership

Contact

You can reach the Galaxy Steering Committee via the mailing list.