[BioC] BioC Developers Meeting

[Wolfgang Huber]

Dear Bioconductors,

as a satellite event to the BioC2006 Conference 
https://cobra.fhcrc.org/BioC2006 there will be a "Developers Meeting" on 
Wed 2 Aug. A formal announcement will follow soon.

This day will include presentations about how to design and program 
software for Bioconductor, but perhaps more importantly, we would like 
to use this day to tackle the question of making the various packages 
that you contribute work together better. In other words, "package 
integration and API standardization".

In order to prepare the agenda for this, I would like to ask for 
feedback and discussion, on this mailing list, about this:

- in which packages or application domains do you see the most need for 
standardization / unification / simplification of what we currently do?

- what data structures (S4 classes and methods) that we currently have 
do you like, or dislike; where should we put in more work?

- there is apparently a trade-off between creativity and 
standardization, do you think we (Bioconductor) are getting it about 
right, or should we put more emphasis on one or another?

- what should be the criteria for emphasizing work on standardization in 
a particular package, or set of related packages, and how can the 
authors be convinced that this is a worthwhile investment of their time?

Best regards
   Wolfgang

-------------------------------------
Wolfgang Huber
European Bioinformatics Institute
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Cambridge CB10 1SD
England
Phone: +44 1223 494642
Fax:   +44 1223 494486
Http:  www.ebi.ac.uk/huber