OME 2016 Users Meeting

For those of you who couldn’t make it to Dundee for OME 2016, or maybe just didn’t get to all the sessions you wanted to, we have a range of content on our downloads site–notes, slides and even movie versions of workshop presentations–available to browse from downloads.openmicroscopy.org/presentations/2016/Users-Meeting/ or linked via the programme page if there is specific content you’re interested in.

One of the things the user meeting is really valuable for is hearing about what the rest of the community is doing with our tools so the lightning talks have been a really valuable edition to the format over the past two years. Together with the formal talks, this year’s examples illustrate people doing everything from archiving to data visualization to image processing, from the scale of individual institutions to international research collaborations.

It’s always great to hear positive stories from the community rather than only getting feedback when something needs fixing. To this end, we’d always invite you to make use of the mailing lists and forums to discuss the challenges you’re working on even if you don’t necessarily need help. We’d also be keen to feature your stories on this blog if you’d like to submit something longer e.g. with screenshots - you can open a PR at github.com/ome/blog/ or just drop us an email and we’ll get back to you for details. Did you know we maintain a list of publications using our tools on www.openmicroscopy.org/site/about/publications? We are always happy to hear of new citations to add.

An even newer addition this year was the Unconference sessions on the third day. Again, we’ve put some notes from the session up on our downloads site. The topics covered in the Technical Developer discussions include data pipelines, federation and scaling, while the Admining OMERO section is more about managing data and users, having grown out of a session aimed at facility managers.

The File Formats discussion provides a good example of how we carry issues raised forward. The Unconference session on Reader integration and decentralisation prompted the creation of a GitHub Design issue where the interested members of the community can follow the options we’re considering and make comments.

If you haven’t noticed our Design repo before, you can find Issues relating to a whole range of design scoping for the UI, OMERO.web viewer, Folders etc. You do need a GitHub account to comment but signing up only requires a valid email address. Similarly, we have a selection of public Trello boards at trello.com/ome to help you track what’s going on with the project, and receive notifications and give feedback if you sign up for free.

We’ve had some great feedback from the meeting attendees and would love to carry forward more positive engagement and to help empower our user community to help each other. We’ll be looking at ways to try to promote the activities of our community better going forward and in the meantime, please keep in touch!