<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>At the end of January I travelled to the States to speak at and attend the first O’Reilly
Bioinformatics Technology Conference [14]. It was a large, well-organized and diverse
meeting with an interesting history. Although the meeting was not a typical academic conference,
its style will, I am sure, become more typical of meetings in both biological and
computational sciences.</p> <p>Speakers at the event included prominent bioinformatics researchers such as Ewan Birney,
Terry Gaasterland and Lincoln Stein; authors and leaders in the open source programming
community like Damian Conway and Nat Torkington; and representatives from several
publishing companies including the Nature Publishing Group, Current Science Group and
the President of O’Reilly himself, Tim O’Reilly. There were presentations, tutorials,
debates, quizzes and even a ‘jam session’ for musical bioinformaticists.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2002 Jun; 3(3):264-269