Blogpost: core retreat

src/content/blog/2024/core_retreat_Feb_2024.mdx

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+---
+title: 'core team retreat'
+subtitle: 'Why not come to Stockholm in February? 🥶'
+pubDate: 2024-02-08T00:11:00+01:00
+headerImage: '/assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/group_pic4.jpg'
+headerImageAlt: 'Viking core team'
+authors:
+    - 'FranBonath'
+label:
+    - 'community'
+embedHeaderImage: false
+---
+
+import work_pic1 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/work_pic1.png';
+import viking1 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/viking1.jpg';
+import viking2 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/viking2.jpg';
+import viking3 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/viking3.jpg';
+import viking4 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/viking4.jpg';
+import viking5 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/viking5.jpg';
+import viking6 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/viking6.jpg';
+import viking7 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/viking7.jpg';
+import viking8 from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/viking8.jpg';
+import phin from '@assets/images/blog/core_retreat_Feb_2024/phin.jpg';
+
+import { Image } from 'astro:assets';
+
+<Image src={work_pic1} alt="core team working at retreat" />
+
+Between the 5th and 8th of February, the core team and members of the steering group met in icy Stockholm to discuss upcoming challenges and improvements to the community.
+We spent four days discussing key questions and projects for the community and getting stuck into kickstarting key initiatives.
+The topics and decisions are outlined below.
+
+# Structure and Governance
+
+### Improve transparency
+
+To keep everyone in the loop about what is happening in the community and what decisions are taken, the core team will introduce a quarterly blog post with updates about infrastructure, pipeline maintenance and the leadership.
+We will also try to better document how new members are added to the different [governance teams](/governance/), with a slightly more formalised process.
+
+### Special interest groups
+
+An exiting development is that nf-core wants to establish _"Special interest groups"_ to encourage people within the nf-core community with similar interest to meet and work together.
+We spent a disproportionate amount of time arguing about the name for these: SIGs / COSIs / communities / working groups etc etc - naming things is hard!
+More information on this new initiative will be presented in the [bytesize talk on February 20th](/events/2024/bytesize_workgroups_intro) and in a dedicated blog post / website section soon.
+
+### Funding
+
+As many open-source communities, funding is an important topic. The nf-core community has applied for another grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, but we will not hear about a decision until later in the year. Until then, the community is run on volunteer work by all of you and supported by different universities and institutions.
+
+# Outreach and Community
+
+### Training and Documentation overhaul
+
+One of the main goals of nf-core is to provide easy to use and well documented tools and pipelines. While the pipeline documentation pages are generally in a good state, the docs for tools and training are a bit scattered throughout the website and at times not very accessible. You can look forward to a complete overhaul of the docs page towards a more modular setup, which will also help putting together more targeted training for different levels of knowledge. Be aware that this is a major project and will likely require a good amount of time.
+
+### Publication of a nf-core v2.0 paper
+
+It has been 4 years since the first nf-core paper was published and the community has changed a lot since then.
+Not only has it grown tremendously, but we also experienced a lot of technical changes including the update to Nextflow DSL2, the introduction of modules and subworkflows and upgrades to nf-core/tools.
+To reflect these changes, the core team would like to publish an updated state of nf-core paper.
+A first draft is in the works and will also emphasize the work done in the community built around Euro-FAANG that sparked the idea about creating nf-core special interest groups.
+
+### nf-core mentorship program
+
+The three previous nf-core mentorship rounds have been a great success.
+However, with the uncertainty of further funding, it was a major discussion point how nf-core would be able to provide continues opportunities for both new, but also more experienced members of the communities.
+There are plans to change the mentorship program to be volunteer based, whereas prospective mentors can set more targeted aims and community members can apply to be a mentee of (a) specific mentor(s).
+More information will be available soon, so keep your eyes on the `#announcements` channel in Slack.
+
+### Open office hours for nf-core developers
+
+As a trial, nf-core wants to implement weekly open office hours to bring people together to collaborate on pull-request reviews and discuss issues developers experience during their work on nf-core related items.
+This _won't_ be for training or support, but rather a collaborative space for collaborative work within nf-core.
+Stay tuned for a blog post with more information coming soon.
+
+# Technical Improvements
+
+### Roadmap for nf-core/tools
+
+There are lots of smaller and bigger improvements to nf-core/tools in the works and the core team discussed and prioritised the major tasks for the start of 2024.
+Special mention to the upcoming config builder ([#2731](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/issues/2731)) that will help new users to create institutional or other config files to run nf-core and other nextflow pipelines.
+We will also be focussing on a more flexible / minimal pipeline template ([#2340](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/issues/2340)) and some major improvements to the Nextflow schema ([#2429](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/issues/2429)).
+
+### Restructuring of nf-core/modules
+
+Newly added features in nf-test, will allow us to drop the `tags.yml` files for nf-core modules and subworkflow.
+Thinking further ahead, we continued our discussions on the structure of nf-core modules directories for better portability and workflow-level tests.
+
+### Reference genomes
+
+Many nf-core analysis pipelines use AWS-iGenomes for reference indexes. However it suffers from a number of well documented problems.
+The core team continued discussions about a potential successor to AWS-iGenomes and made tentative first steps towards building something new. Stay tuned for updates.
+
+### Resource optimization
+
+The goal is to improve resource usage on the module level and as a first step it is planned to make use of optimized configs taken from Seqera platform.
+
+### Benchmarking
+
+Wouldn't it be great to know how a nf-core pipeline compares to other pipelines or to a previous version?
+The core team decided to do a proof of concept for `nf-core/sarek` and `nf-core/multipesequencealign`, to investigate the feasibility and time demands.
+
+### Wave and nf-core
+
+[Seqera Wave](https://seqera.io/wave/) is a way to generate software containers and it was discussed if and how Wave could be used to help developers in nf-core.
+
+# nf-core/vikings
+
+As is becoming tradition for nf-core events in Stockholm, the group visited at the viking-themed restaurant [Aifur](https://aifur.se/).
+Much silliness ensued.
+
+<Image src={viking1} alt="first viking" height="300" />
+<Image src={viking2} alt="second viking" height="300" />
+<Image src={viking3} alt="third viking" height="300" />
+<Image src={viking5} alt="fourth viking" height="300" />
+<Image src={viking6} alt="fifth viking" height="300" />
+<Image src={viking7} alt="sixth viking" height="300" />
+<Image src={viking8} alt="seventh viking" height="300" />
+<Image src={viking4} alt="eighth viking" height="300" />
+
+# fin
+
+All the excitement was too much for some of the team members.
+Thank you to everyone who attended and worked hard to make this week happen!
+
+<Image src={phin} alt="sleepy viking" height="300" />