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Highlights from the Galaxy Community Conference 2021


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After two intense weeks of training, conference and collaboration fest, the Galaxy Community Conference 2021 (GCC2021) 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.


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:

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:

Education and community outreach, proteomics and deployment of Galaxy were presented on day 3, followed by 5 new BoFs:

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.


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!


Thank you to all the organizers, scientific program committee, sponsors and the Galaxy community for the engagement, enthusiasm and contributions!!