BOSS EVENTS Phase 1: Sensitize through Open Science FAIR Symposium. – BHKi

"We’ve told you of the journey up to the funding, which was the beginning of the story. Having obtained the funds, we began the work. How do you best empower and impart Bioinformatics and Open science skills in researchers? We already had a road map, sensitize – train – hack – collaborate – community, so we had to put it in action. And the #BOSSEvents was activated. In the Sensitize phase, we held the Open Science FAIR Symposium on October 11th-15th. It was a five-day affair filled with incredible insights on Open Science, FAIR data principles, research data management, publishing open access, contributing to open source projects, communities, reproducibility in research, and more. We made an open call on Twitter and an extensive mailing list, extending an invite to the event, and the turnout was not disappointing. We received about 130 applications from various African countries such as Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Morocco, Nigeria, Tunisia, Botswana, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. We also had participants outside the African continent from countries like the United States of America, India, Lithuania, France, Bangladesh, Iran, New Zealand, South Korea, and Portugal. Of these applicants, we had approximately 35-55 participants on different days from different regions such as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania USA, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and South Korea. We also reached out to speakers and received terrific feedback from each of them, securing a yes from all of them. Having an audience, a program and experts, we kicked off. ..."