2026 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2026)
The annual gathering of the Galaxy Community with opportunities to hear latest developments, get training, and meet everyone involved.
GCC2026 CollaborationFest (CoFest!)
June 25-26, 2026
What to Expect at CoFest
The goals of CoFest are to expand the Galaxy contributor community and its ecosystem.
CoFest participants will collaborate around project tracks, each with real, achievable goals and a team of people to work on them together. Tracks will span the full breadth of the Galaxy ecosystem:
- Wrap & annotate tools – Get Galaxy-compatible tools into the hands of researchers.
- Build & improve workflows – Develop and refine best-practice workflows for the community.
- Shape the user experience – Tackle interface improvements that make Galaxy more intuitive for everyone.
- Strengthen the platform – Dig into the core codebase and help make Galaxy more robust.
- Grow the training ecosystem – Update, improve, and create GTN tutorials that help researchers worldwide.
- Build community – Contribute to governance, outreach, and the things that keep Galaxy’s community thriving.
How It Works
CoFest is intentionally informal. We will have two days of collaborative work/brainstorming with people who care about the same things you do. There’s no rigid agenda. You’ll be matched with a track based on your interests and skills, and each track will have experienced contributors ready to help orient you and keep things moving.
You don’t need to know anyone ahead of time, and you don’t need to come with a finished plan. Just show up, find your people, and leave having developed/planned something real together.
Find Your Track
To put together the best possible teams, we would like to know your interests. Fill out the form below to share your background, the kind of work you enjoy, and what you’re hoping to get out of CoFest.
Registration
To attend CoFest, we do ask that you register. This will help us find adequate space and ensure we have enough coffee and drinks.
The registration cost is EUR50, added on top of the GCC2026 conference registration. Select the Are you attending the CoFest/Training on June 25-26? option in the registration form to register for CoFest.
Past projects (GCC 2024 & 2025)
This project involved deploying custom Shiny apps on Galaxy by converting them into R packages and containerizing them with Docker for consistency and portability. Galaxy configuration files were implemented to enable seamless user access. Additionally, existing Shiny apps—such as the Pampa Performance Indicators of Marine Protected Areas—were updated to enhance functionality, showcasing the integration of interactive tools for research and resource management.
Two tutorials were created for the Galaxy Training Network (GTN): “Best Practices for Citing Galaxy”—guiding proper attribution in publications—and “Hybrid Genome Assembly – Nanopore and Illumina”—a workflow for combining sequencing data. Both tutorials followed GTN standards to improve accessibility for researchers.
Planemo was improved to support user-defined tools in Galaxy, enabling direct uploads to the Test Tool Shed and allowing resource requirements (CPU, RAM, GPU) to be specified. Community feedback refined functionality, while support for R scripts and documentation were enhanced to simplify tool development and deployment.
This project focused on modernizing and enhancing the Galaxy interactive tours. Existing tours were thoroughly tested, and all HTML elements were replaced with standardized selectors as defined in the Galaxy navigation configuration. Every core tour was validated for functionality and accuracy, with detailed results documented. Additionally, help text from the deeptools Galaxy integration was converted into interactive tours, improving user guidance and accessibility. The updates ensured a more robust and user-friendly experience for navigating Galaxy’s features.
This project curated Galaxy tools for biodiversity research, adding EDAM annotations and creating filtered collections for the Ecology and Earth SIGs. A wish list for new tools was developed, existing wrappers were reviewed and annotated, and contributions were made to Bio.tools—all to improve accessibility and support for researchers.
Galaxy 24.0 introduced path-based ITs, removing the need for wildcard DNS/SSL and simplifying deployment. This project enabled direct URL path access for ITs, reducing technical barriers and improving flexibility, as outlined in the F1000 Research presentation.