Highlights from the Galaxy Community Conference 2021
399 participants from 55 countries
After two intense weeks of training, conference and collaboration fest, the [__Galaxy Community Conference 2021 (GCC2021)__](https://www.vibconferences.be/events/gcc2021-virtual-edition) has come to an end. This has been the second virtual GCC since the pandemic started and it has featured a week of training, a three-day conference and a two-day CoFest. In total, __399 participants from 55 countries__ attended any of these events.
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Training Week
The training week ran from June 28 through July 2. Three different tracks were offered for scientists, developers and admins. All the lectures were prerecorded, captioned and the experts provided live support in chat or in remo when needed. This format allowed the participants to learn at their own pace, and everything is still available! Check the Galaxy Training Network and the GCC2021 training page.
Conference
The main goal of the Galaxy Community conference is to bring together the community to share our work and address common challenges in data-intensive science, with a special focus on networking. To make it truly global, the schedule ran twice every day shifted by 9 hours. We had, in total, 53 talks, 59 speakers, 44 posters/demos and 17 Birds of a Feather (BoF).
On the first day, the different sessions addressed current challenges (COVID, Biodiversity), Galaxy administration and Workflows.
Between days 1 and 2, several BoFs took place:
- Galaxy & Bioinformatics in Africa
- Galaxy for Microbiome - Kickoff
- Addressing common misconceptions about Galaxy
- Namaste, Galaxy India!
- Rainbow Galaxy People (LGBTQIA)
On the second day, the topics varied from genome annotation and (public) health to use cases, the recent Galaxy developments and the state of the Galaxy.
After the second day, 7 BoFs gathered in both time zones:
- Celestial Masses: Galaxy Platform for Mass Spectrometry Research
- Galaxy Public Health Community
- Accessing NCBI Data in Galaxy
- At the edge of the Galaxy, the lonely life of a (small scale) local Galaxy server admin
- Boost the diversity in your community: Outreachy and other internship-mentorship initiatives
- Galaxy community roadmap planning
- Galaxy & Training / Teaching
Education and community outreach, proteomics and deployment of Galaxy were presented on day 3, followed by 5 new BoFs:
- BoF: Community Hubs: Helping the Hubmakers
- Galaxy on Kubernetes
- GTN-Español - Bioinformatics resources in human-translated Spanish
- IDC - Intergalactic (reference) Data Commission
- Earth in Galaxy: handling georeferenced data in Galaxy
All the recordings are available, with captions in the Galaxy Project YouTube channel and in Sched.
Besides the talks and BoFs, we had the poster/demo/sponsor sessions every day after the second session, with 44 posters presented over the 3 days in both time zones.
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CoFest
The three-day conference was followed by a two-day collaborative work event to expand the contributor community. This year, the CoFest was organized around clusters ideas linked to the recently created Galaxy Working Groups, as these are the entry points for new community members.
To celebrate the success of GCC2021, the Freiburg Galaxy team enjoyed an outdoor BBQ!
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