The Bioinformatics Roadshow - Guidelines for SLING Roadshow Hosts

EMBL-EBI responsibilities

Set up
Once you have agreed with the MoU, the Training Programme Project Leader (Vicky Schneider) will discuss your training needs with you and suggest a combination of training modules that best fits your needs.

Registration
We will provide and manage (if required) a registration system, unless the training modules are being taught as part of a broader programme of training (e.g. a summer school), in which case we ask the host institute to run a registration system. We will make every effort to open registration a minimum of six months before the roadshow and close registration four weeks beforehand, unless otherwise advised. Once registration has closed, we will send the list of delegates to you. If fewer than fifteen persons register an interest eight weeks prior to the start of the course, we reserve the right to cancel the roadshow.

Administration
An event organiser from the EMBL-EBI Outreach and Training Team will be assigned to the event and will liaise with the host to ensure that all queries are answered and the event runs smoothly.

Advertising the Roadshow
We provide promotional guidelines including a set of poster templates to help you promote the roadshow within (and if appropriate) beyond your institute – see here for details.

Training Materials
We will upload the training materials to the EBI website before the roadshow; it will be your responsibility to print these and make them available to the participants. We will endeavour to upload the training materials a minimum of 1 week before the event.

Fact Sheets
We produce a range of professionally printed fact sheets and brochures about many of Europe’s most widely used biological data resources. If you would like to include these we can arrange to mail these out to you before the roadshow for distribution with the tutorial materials in your delegate pack.

Roadshow Feedback
Our trainers will bring course evaluation forms (or an online survey link), which we strongly encourage the participants to complete before they leave at the end of the roadshow. We will also ask you, as host, to complete an evaluation form. We will compile the evaluations after the roadshow and send a copy of the compiled evaluations to you.

Roadshow Trainers
The Bioinformatics Roadshow is a collaborative effort that is funded by the European Commission as part of the SLING Integrating Activity. The Bioinformatics Roadshow is coordinated by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) – Europe’s main provider of biological data – and is run in collaboration with our SLING partners, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the European Patent Office (EPO) and the BRENDA project. Roadshows may therefore involve trainers from institutes other than the EMBL-EBI. Whilst we make every effort to ensure a consistently high standard of training, we are not responsible for the quality of training delivered by individuals from our collaborating partners, outside the EBI.
Once the programme is agreed between you and the Training Programme Project Leader (Vicky Schneider), the Event Organiser responsible for your roadshow will provide you and the assigned trainers with each other’s contact details so that specific scientific aspects of the sessions can be discussed directly between you and the trainers when appropriate.

Host responsibilities

Room and Equipment
As the host of a bioinformatics roadshow, you are responsible for providing suitable training facilities. We require access to an I.T. training room suitable for the expected number of participants (typically 25–30 trainees), equipped with a personal computer for each trainee. Each computer should have an ethernet-based (not wireless) internet connection, equivalent to a broadband connection per user. We are happy to work with Microsoft Windows, Linux or Apple Mac-based systems. Please make sure that the same system is installed on all the training computers, and tell us in advance which system will be in use (so that the training materials can be created accordingly). Computers will require a platform-independent web browser such as Mozilla, Firefox or Opera, with Java 1.4 or above. If you have any concerns about equipment or internet speed in your training facility, please raise them when you first contact us about hosting a roadshow.

Organising a Date
Once you have agreed to this MoU, we can proceed with the booking of the roadshow, we will discuss suitable dates, taking into account your availability as well as the availability of appropriate trainers. It is your responsibility to confirm the best date in writing, as soon as possible. Owing to the great demand for roadshows, we are unable to hold provisional dates for longer than two weeks. If you cannot confirm the dates for your roadshow within this time period we may give your slot to another host.

Providing Information
Once you have agreed to this MoU, a checklist will be sent to you requesting information about various aspects of the roadshow including picture of the training room, its layout, helpful travel information for the trainers etc. This form needs to be completed fully in order for the EBI Event Organiser to assist you with the event.

Registration
We ask you to clearly define the target audience for the roadshow in terms of the level of training required. This ensures that we can best match the training options with your needs. We also ask that all roadshow trainees register in advance of the roadshow using the registration system provided (if you are managing your own registrations, we require certain questions to be asked of the delegates; a list will be provided). If there are fewer than fifteen trainees registered for the roadshow eight weeks prior to the start, we reserve the right to cancel the roadshow.

Printing of Materials
You are responsible for reproducing the training materials, which will be uploaded onto the EBI website in a timely manner before the event. We will contact you as soon as we have done this.

Costs and Refreshments
We do not charge a fee for training, and the costs of sending our trainers to you are met by our SLING funding. However, we do ask you to provide food and refreshments for the trainers and trainees during the roadshow. In our experience, the trainees get much more out of a roadshow if they have time during the breaks to interact with the trainers and other trainees. Please bear this in mind when organising coffee and lunch breaks.

Accommodation
We request that you help us to organise accommodation for our trainers. Please use accommodation that your organisation uses on a regular basis and that you can confirm to be of an acceptable standard to other visiting academics. Our trainers are not expected to share rooms and we believe that you will be rewarded by a much higher standard of training if they have had a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed!

Advertising the Roadshow
It is your responsibility to promote the roadshow throughout your institution and beyond it through posters, announcements and e-mails [see promotion] to the relevant target audience. As you are hosting a SLING-funded roadshow, we ask you to reserve a minimum of three places for trainees travelling from elsewhere. We ask you to do this for the benefit of trainees who do not have the facilities for a roadshow in their home organisation. We need your help to reach these trainees: please promote your roadshow through your country's existing bioinformatics networks, or through your personal contacts, to ensure that SLING can provide bioinformatics user training to trainees who would otherwise be unable to benefit from it.

Travel

Institute Representative