[Tdwg-phylo] Recruiting members of the iEvoBio 2012 Organizing Committee

[Hilmar Lapp]

iEvoBio, the conference on Informatics for Phylogenetics, Evolution,  
and Biodiversity, is a recently founded satellite conference held in  
conjunction with the Evolution meetings. iEvoBio aims to be a forum  
bringing together biologists working in evolution, systematics, and  
biodiversity, with software developers, and mathematicians, both to  
catalyse the development of new tools, and to increase awareness of  
the possibilities offered by existing technologies (ranging from mega- 
scale data analysis to rich visualization). The inaugural meeting was  
held in 2010 (see http://ievobio.org/2010) and received wide acclaim;  
the second one, held in 2011 (see http://ievobio.org/2011), was  
similarly successful and productive. The conference is poised to  
establish itself as a self-sustaining annual event and a must-attend  
for researchers, developers, and users of informatics resources in our  
fields.

For the 2012 iEvoBio conference, to be held in junction with the 2012  
Evolution Meetings in Ottawa, Canada, we are seeking new members to  
join us on the organizing committee. Aside from being enthusiastic  
about the conference itself, we are particularly interested in people  
with research pursuits that involve integrative, interdisciplinary,  
and synthetic questions, and a commitment to promoting the reuse of  
data, information, and software.

Serving on the iEvoBio organizing committee entails attending weekly  
conference calls, and sharing responsibility for making the conference  
happen at all stages, including crafting communications such as calls  
for abstracts, managing content contributions from participants, and  
budgeting.

The iEvoBio organizing committee shapes and manages the entire event,  
from start to finish.  As such, participating in the committee  
provides ample opportunities for people with ideas, wild or not, to  
conceive innovative program elements towards iEvoBio’s social  
objectives of fostering participation, interaction, and collaboration,  
and to make those happen. The committee has been marked by an open- 
minded, highly constructive, but also deeply professional climate.  
Serving on the committee is actual work, but also provides a unique  
opportunity to collaborate with like-minded people who one may not  
otherwise get to work with, on a product for the benefit of our  
community and the advancement of our science.

To apply, fill out a short online application form at http://bit.ly/okxqS1 
  by October 15th, 2011.  We expect the organizing committee to have  
at least 6-7 members, and thus currently at least 4-5 seats are  
available to be filled through this call.  This call is open to people  
at all professional “grades” and our hope is that at least one, and  
hopefully more, seats will be filled with graduate or postdoctoral  
students.  We (see the undersigned below) will sort through the  
applications and reach a decision within one week after close of  
applications. If you have any questions about the conference or the  
committee, we encourage you to resolve these before applying by  
contacting us (see email addresses below).

Please feel free to re-send, tweet (http://bit.ly/qyYT0s), or share  
this message as needed. Thanks!

On behalf of the future 2012 iEvoBio Organizing Committee,
Rob Guralnick (robert.guralnick at colorado.edu), University of Colorado  
at Boulder
Hilmar Lapp (hlapp at nescent.org), National Evolutionary Synthesis  
Center (NESCent)