| Author(s) |
 
Wendi Bacon
|
Posted on: 19 June 2025
This is my ode to the Galaxy Community to say how grateful I have been for your welcome, your energy, and your support. I have learned so very, very much, about bioinformatics; about software development; and most of all, about open-source communities in this complex scientific world.
I firmly believe what so many in this Community have shown - once a Galaxy member, always a Galaxy member.
- To
Pablo Moreno , who introduced me to Galaxy by running my postdoc manuscript data - which had taken months of back & forth with a bioinformatician - through a workflow to generate all our plots in <10 minutes;
- To
Mehmet Tekman , who received my very first ‘submit feedback’ message to Galaxy, which I was rather unlikely to send and felt uncomfortable about, and who immediately responded with great joy: “Brilliant, we haven’t had any wet labbers sit and look at this, how can we improve it?”, which was the most Galaxy response ever, and set the tone for what I believed in this community;
- To
Saskia Hiltemann &
Helena Rasche who probably spent more time fixing or building stuff for me than sleeping, to the phenomenal tacos
- To the numerous, numerous reviews that taught me so much, such as ‘don’t swear in your commit messages’, or what the hell linting is, to debugging and yaml files, metadata headers and how to Git;
- To the Minnesota, 2022 Galaxy conference. For
Gareth Price showing up to our training session on single-cell analysis, and to
Björn Grüning for meeting me for the first time with a giant hug. For strangers randomly knowing who I was and making me feel welcome - likely due to my chaotic entries into Gitter & Github.
- To the USA Galaxy communities for taking me with them to their dinners and socials, to
Delphine Lariviere for being my ride-or-die, and to the Corner Bar for - in my humble opinion - the best social experience of a GCC and the best cocktail. You taught me to love conferences;
- To the excellent koala I got to hold at GCC in Australia;
- To the Communities for showing up to trial our lightning pitches in 2024, a very public experience!;
- To the CoFests that built things I could never have built on my own;
- To the conversations across Github issues, holding 12 different chats with the same person discussing 12 different ideas, knowing any dreams or wishes or problems were not thrown into the abyss, but to genuine, caring, passionate people who want to make it better;
- To the fantastic ELIXIR Galaxy community members, that meant whenever I showed up on my own to a conference or event or all-hands in Europe, I immediately had a family;
- To the Galaxy Community Board members, particularly
Bérénice Batut ,
Beatriz Serrano-Solano , and
Hans-Rudolf Hotz , who were willing to take a punt on a newbie with a bit of energy;
- To the original Exec Board, for watching me give my talk in Australia on all the things we need to change, and instead of lambasting me, invited me to their Board
- To the women and nonbinary members of Galaxy who attended our VENUS lunch in 2024 GCC, and for your friendly support on Matrix, Slack, email, WhatsApp, and in general;
- To every course participant who sticks with through the boring pre-processing steps and makes it to the fun images at the end;
- To every EOSC and ELIXIR travel grant I managed to get, which has had profound, long-lasting impacts on me and every intern and student we’ve managed to bring (and of course, led to a heap ton of contributions and projects!);
- And finally, to my phenomenal, brilliant, caring, capable, interns, masters & PhD students who now champion open-source and community development.
From looking back, to looking ahead, what do I see as the future focus for Galaxy?
- A better mechanism for getting early career researchers and women/nonbinary members on funding ladders: From small pots of travel funding or internships as part of wider grants - any way to get a more diverse group of colleagues onto bids as co-investigators or principal investigators will help the community develop sustainably in the future.
- Stronger connection across continents & focus areas: Our working groups are largely USA-driven, our Special Interest Groups are largely EU-driven. We are a large, diverse, sprawling Community, we have part-time, temporary, full-time, and permanent contributors. We need to connect all these groups, from domain experts and user engagement through all the way to backend development; across geographical location and economic disparities; and across levels of contributorship.
- User-centric design: What if every decision we made was user-driven? What if diverse groups of users, past, present, and future, were involved in every decision from UI to workflows? What if user testing, engagement, surveys, and/or Collaboration Fests were fundamentally a part of every poster, training course, blog post, or presentation we delivered?
There’s always plenty to fix, but I am grateful for the experience I have had with the Galaxy Community. You taught me how to think globally and openly, how to work confidently across disciplines, and how profoundly valuable the will to ‘show up and try’ is. So thank you, Galaxy Community, for the experience thus far!
It is fitting, given how much I have learned and how much of my life I’ve spent on the Galaxy Training Network in the last 5 years, that this ode lives in the GTN.
