[ome-devel] 2019 OME User Meetings and Training Workshops

[Jason Swedlow (Staff)]

Dear All-


We wanted to update you on our plans for meetings with the OME Community for 2019.


As many of you know, we've held a Users Meeting annually since 2004. Our first was in Dundee (in December... it wasn't that successful) and then, with an invitation from Spencer Shorte and his colleagues at Institut Pasteur, the meeting was held every year during June in Paris from 2005 to 2015. Lots more people came, and the meeting grew in size and scope over several years. We're very grateful to Spencer and the Institut Pasteur for all their support for OME and the community during these 10 years of development and growth.


In 2016, we, with some trepidation, tested the idea of having the meeting in Dundee.  We were pleased to see that the meeting grew again and has been successfully run in Dundee each June since. The Annual Users Meeting has become a great opportunity for members of the community interested in handling complex multi-dimensional data-- in microscopy, high content screening and digital pathology -- to come together, assess the current status of the field, and consider next directions. The result is that the Annual Users Meeting has become one of the most important events in the OME calendar and our work and releases are scheduled around it.


In parallel, in the last year, OME has embarked on a significant increase in its outreach and training programmes, to engage more users and use cases.  This effort has been very useful, with training programmes run every few weeks all over the world (see https://www.openmicroscopy.org/events/ for more info). Several sites have invited the OME team to visit-- all we ask is that the costs of travel and accommodation are covered.


Given this success, we've been looking at alternative ways we can continue our training programmes.  In the next few days, we will announce OMERO User training programmes here in Dundee.  Currently, we are planning for a full 2-day workshop that targets imaging facility managers, experimental biologists and users who will focus on using OMERO for data management and some scripted analysis.  We plan on holding User workshops in April and June. Spaces are limited so it will be first come, first serve. We are also planning an OMERO Systems Workshop, very likely in September.  We'll announce all of these on the lists and forums.


The upshot of all these training sessions, as well as those that we have been invited to run at other sites is that we won't have the bandwidth to hold an OME Users Meeting in June-- not enough time to prepare all the various releases and deal with logistics.  Making this decision has been hard, as we really enjoy meeting new faces and old friends, but just reflects the realities of our current outreach and training programmes. We think it is likely we'll hold a Users Meeting using the same format as the past 14 yrs in 2020.


I hope that makes sense.  Thanks again for all the usage of our tools and support of the project.

Cheers,

Jason

Jason Swedlow, PhD, FRSE
Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression
Division of Computational Biology
Open Microscopy Environment
University of Dundee
http://openmicroscopy.org<http://openmicroscopy.org/>
http://www.lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/people/jason-swedlow


The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish Charity, No: SC015096
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