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