International Society for Computational Biology http://www.iscb.org organises the ISMB conference and local conferences in Latin America and Africa Steffen world-wide Open Bioinformatics Foundation http://open-bio.org organises the annual BOSC (Bionformatics Open Source Conference) as a satellite conference to the ISMB focusing on the strengthening of Free software in our field. It hosts web sites for the Bio{Java,Perl,Python,SQL} libraries. Steffen world-wide Gesellschaft für Informatik, Fachgruppe Informatik in den Biowissenschaften http://www.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/groups/fg402/ organises annual (mostly) english-spoken German Conference in Bioinforamtics Steffen de/at/ch Software in the Public Interest http://www.spi-inc.org/ A company existing only for the purpose of organising funds for Debian. Regional cooperations help with saving transfer costs. world-wide provides an internet platform for the exchange of wet-lab protocols or hardware build instructions http://openwetware.org/ world-wide The BioBricks Foundation a not-for-profit organization founded by engineers and scientists from MIT, Harvard, and UCSF with significant experience in both non-profit and commercial biotechnology research. BBF encourages the development and responsible use of technologies based on BioBrick™ standard DNA parts that encode basic biological functions. http://biobricks.org/ world-wide The NorduGrid and its KnowARC EU Project help to bring scientific packages into Debian for their subsequent use as runtime environments in grid computing http://www.knowarc.eu world-wide, mostly northern Europe Steffen