Nearly 100 people attended our inaugural conference on April 12, 2011, and we thank everyone for your energy and enthusiasm. Some of you reported that our meeting was more valuable than BioITWorld itself! Yes, we’re blushing–but we hope that our meeting gave existing members and those who have not yet joined the Alliance better insights into the power of precompetitive collaboration.
Lightning talk speakers participate in the "open debate" session at the Pistoia Alliance Conference on April 12, 2011.
Congratulations to Hans de Bie of ACD Labs, who won the drawing from the stack of evaluations we received to win a US$50.00 certificate to Amazon.com. The feedback from the conference was extremely helpful, and we’re already at work planning future meetings.
Special thanks to all of our external speakers. Tim Clark showed us how the semantic web is being applied today in W3C initiatives. And our lightning talk speakers inspired and challenged everyone in the room to envision new ways of working.
All the talks from the meeting will be posted to our conference webpage in the next week or two. In the meantime, you can view the presentation on the Pistoia Alliance delivered by board member Ramesh Durvasula at BioITWorld. Ramesh summarized achievements in the biology domain, specifically with the sequence services and SESL initiatives. The proofs of concepts for the sequence services project are currently available for evaluation, and we hope you’ll try them out and send your feedback to us.
Although I very much applaud your efforts and think they are vital to the future wellbeing of pharma, are you not just a little concerned about the lack of diversity in the Pistoia Alliance? I mean you’re almost entirely white and male. Surely a few more minority faces (and remember, so-called minorities are together worldwide majorities!) and women would make the Alliance more representative of the world we live in today.
I sincerely hope we will see the make-up of the Alliance change to more reflect our diverse world in the future.
Thanks for your kind remarks, Bob. I hope that some of my fellow Pistoians will weigh in. I must also clarify that this response comes from the “token woman” on the Pistoia ops team (and, unfortunately, I’m in the “girly” comms role to boot).
It is my impression, having been in the scientific software industry for over 20 years now, that Pistoia’s demographic mirrors that of scientific IT, which is (unfortunately) primarily male. Certainly in the early 90s when I started in this business there was also a distinct lack of melanin at software users meetings and conferences I attended. I think that has improved significantly in the past 10 years, particularly when you consider the strong influence of contract IT organizations in South Asia and elsewhere.
Additionally, one must consider Pistoia’s roots. I think most of us would argue that our problem isn’t so much being white and male, but being European (and, more specifically British!). This stems mainly from who founded the organization and has been actively involved since. The good news is we recognize this and are working to rectify it. It’s one of the reasons we chose to hold our first conference in the United States, where we could reach out to some of the US based organizations and biotechs and get them involved in our initiative.
This initiative looks very promising. My main hope is that it is/will be run by people who take the scientific perspective.. From my own experience, I’ve seen many potentially ground-breaking IT approaches that were highjacked by Empty Suit IT types who just used it to look good within their organizations and get promoted rather than to actually contribute something of tangible utility to hard-pressed scientists. Many such scientists are now very skeptical about “cloud computing” not because they think it doesn’t work or can’t add value but rather because it is often used as a buzz phrase by supercilious careerists who know little science or IT. If Pistoia is to succeed, and it is sincerely to be hoped that it will succeed, it needs to be sold by people with real skills who can engage with the scientists for whom it will have most impact. This, I believe, is much more important than worrying about the gender or racial mix of its representatives. Best of luck to all concerned!