DNADigest Hackday and Metadata

DNADigest held a free Hackday this past Saturday, April 5th 2014, in London. Luckily they also live transmitted the event via Internet, and it was definitely worth waking up at 5AM (UTC -3) to watch it!

DNADigest is a not-for-profit organization that is working on solutions for secure data sharing. This problem involves several fields (metadata, infrastructure, data encryption, genomics, …) and is obviously a very complicated one, so props to DNADigest for working on this.

They made sure the video for the Hackday was always working properly (big thanks Suraj!), but the audio wasn’t so good. From what I could tell the atmosphere was really nice and made the whole event a very productive meeting. I hope to be near London to participate in a future DNADigest Hackday.

The activities were coordinated by the DNADigest team and while I couldn’t listen to the audio very well, the Twitter #dnahd hashtag was being constantly updated, and everybody was hacking together using Hackpad.

My interest wasn’t exactly on data encryption, privacy or data sharing, but yes on metadata, since this is probably one of the items from BioUno roadmap that we’ll tackle next. The result was amazing. I couldn’t attend it, but after the event I had a list with tools, standards and papers to read about metadata.

Check the DNADigest hackpad and website for more, and support their crowdfunding campaign too.