i5K Coordinating Group

Oct 19, 2022

11:00-12:00 EDT

The focus of this meeting will be on continuing to re-vision i5K.

Attending: Anna Childers, Chris Childers, Glenn Hanes, Sue Brown, Rob Waterhouse, Sarthok Rahman, Marc Halfon, Monica Poelchau, fringy Richards, Duane McKenna, Surya Saha, Brad Coates, Michael Pfrender, Michael Branstetter

  • Past Meeting Updates
    • ICE-Helsinki (Rob). Rob’s session went well.
  • Upcoming Meetings [brief updates, if any]
    • Biodiversity Genomics-Hinxton, 3-7 October 2022 (Mark, Rob, Anna): Post-meeting
      • Suggestion - hybrid in future with local, in-person engagement
      • Talk quality was good
      • Might be nice to highlight talks afterwards so you know to go back to them later
    • ESA-Vancouver, 13-16 November 2022 (Brad, Catherine)
      • things are moving along
      • regarding talk quality assessment - ESA has a way to ‘star’ talks on their conference portal
  • Publications - no updates
  • EBP Update (Anna)
    • governance of org structure
    • global DSI handling
    • proposal - 1% tax on anyone who benefits from DSI, which could go back to groups where the samples originated that typically don’t see any financial benefits
    • DEI discussions
    • how to move EBP beyond phase 1
    • of the new genomes that are available on GOAT, the highest quality tend to be from EBP
  • Presentation on All of Us platform (fringy)
    • possible model for how i5k Workspace could evolve
    • question regarding credit towards those who develop the pipelines - how can it be ensured that bioinformaticists’ work is valued and not disregarded?
    • should training on analyses focus on making analyses too easy, or explaining how the analyses should be performed?
    • foster collaborations between bench/field scientists and computational biologists, in addition to training in bioinformatics? E.g. Beenome project
    • scientific use case scenario - e.g. typical conservation genomics pipelines, or identify the top 10 ag100pest analyses
    • Use case from Sarthok’s lab - GWAS, workflow in github, whole lab tries to do analyze in the same way - e.g. Galaxy model
  • Visioning 2022 (Monica, Brad)
    • Brief recap of last month’s meeting
      • Two levels to think about here
        • small concrete suggestions that came out of the lunches/discussions
        • vision and mission and longer term future for i5k
        • also how the workspace fits into this future
    • Old and new vision review
      • ‘Priority setting’ ⇒ less important these days
      • ‘coordination among projects’ ⇒ more important these days
      • training ⇒ still just as important as ever
      • ‘protocols’ ⇒ called ‘guidelines’ previously, this is probably more important than ever now - protocols for all steps from sampling to data analysis (compgeno) - analysis protocols can be considered analogous to computational workflows
      • how to give recognition / incentive for community contributions to common good tools/workflows/notebooks (micro-publications)
      • old vision had clear objectives to connect with funders - this did not come up this time in the review … some success with lobbying US Congress, but it is really hard and things move really slowly ⇒ have we been talking to too-high-a-level and need to go down a notch to wider decision makers?
      • What about getting support from e.g. National Academy of Entomology, other stakeholders that could benefit from genome data
      • Need to communicate use-cases, concrete understandable examples of benefits to humans ecosystems etc.
    • Discussion of new reasonable and manageable action items/approaches to act on vision
    • If time, discuss whether we:
      • Could put together a new action plan that would be worth funding via an RCN or other mechanism, or
      • Conversely, pare down i5K so that the action plan items are reasonable and manageable for a non-funded group

NEXT MEETING: November 16, 2022

11:00-12:00 EST

Note, this is EST with the time change