PhyloStars

Home page for PhyloStars project, which aims to develop a socially networked online community of practice for evolutionary applications of bioinformatics.

About

We propose to engage the evolution community with a participant-driven meeting aimed at (1) developing and disseminating topical bioinformatics solutions that serve recognized needs of researchers, and (2) developing the capacity to meet this ongoing need in a self-sustaining way, via an online, global, socially networked community-of-practice. We have pledges of support for this project from SMBE and BioSynC.

The main platform for this PhyloStars community (hashtag #phylostars) will be BioStars.org, an existing bioinformatics Q & A site. The developer of BioStars, Istvan Albert, has joined our organizing team.

The main features of the plan (as currently developed) are as follows

• advertise to stakeholders our plan to leverage BioStars to create an online community that shares phyloinformatics solutions.
• encourage stakeholders to join the community and build up status points
• sponsor a burst of activity at a 4-day face-to-face meeting
• track usage statistics (users, questions, answers) throughout the process
• follow up with a workshop at an international meeting

Current news and announcements

• We have not yet scheduled the f2f meeting. Probably February.
• The organizing team now includes Istvan Albert, Julie Allen, Hilmar Lapp (PI), Michael Rosenberg, Brian Sidlauskas, Arlin Stoltzfus (PI), Rutger Vos, and Mark Westneat (PI).

Links to Resources

• relevant Q&A sites
  • BioStars
  • SeqAnswers (next-gen sequencing) has quite a few phylogeny-related questions
  • StackOverflow has programming-related phylogeny questions
  • Phylo-relevant questions (e.g., consensus tree) sometimes appear on ResearchGate
• examples of content that could be worked into a mini-tutorial
  • Peter Forey on consensus trees and support values
  • wikipedia list of tree viz software
• Before vs. After view
• File:PhyloStarsProposal.pdf
• PhyloStars/PlanningAndMeetings