After three years gap, we conducted two successful ‘OpenSpecimen Annual Community Meet‘ (OSCON22) in St. Louis (USA) on Sept 19-20th and on Oct 18th in Perth (Australia).
The goal of OSCON is to build a community between OpenSpecimen customers across the globe, present new features, and seek product feedback for new features and improvements.
Packed with various workshops, user training sessions, and presentations by some of our largest customers, the events were a huge hit. Read the highlights of both events below.
“Thanks so much for taking the time and effort to put this conference together. I appreciated the opportunity to speak at OSCON and thought the conference was incredibly useful and informative. What you have done with OpenSpecimen is very impressive.”
Conference Overview
Around 80+ end-users from 40+ organizations from the USA, Australia, and Europe joined OSCON events.
OSCON Photo Highlights:
Objectives:
The main objective of OSCON is to build a “community” of OpenSpecimen users. OSCON helps users to meet users from other centers and learn how OpenSpecimen is used in different scenarios.
The other objectives include conducting training workshops for new features and seeking feedback and user pain points.
Customer Talks
The following customers gave presentations on their usage of OpenSpecimen.
| Presenter | Topic |
| Dave Mulvihill | Overview of OpenSpecimen usage at Washington University |
| Mark Watson | Use of OpenSpecimen for the NCI’s NCTN Alliance Biorepositories and Biospecimen Resource |
| Heidi Miers | OpenSpecimen Project Request Module |
| Rachel Abbott | OpenSpecimen usage at Gynecologic Oncology biorepository |
| Donna Housley | OpenSpecimen Use at the University of Utah |
| Richard Renshaw | Implementing OpenSpecimen – The University of Oxford Experience |
| Dr. Nantia Lakovidou | Usage of OpenSpecimen at University of Cyprus biobank |
| Jenna Bowen | Usage of OpenSpecimen at Hunter Cancer Biobank |
Training Workshops
OSCON is a great way to learn about new features and brush up on the old ones that are less popular but can be very useful. We conducted workshops and training sessions for the end-users on the below-listed topics.
| Onboarding new labs | Requests and distribution |
| Managing Workflows & screen configurations | eConsents |
| Collection Protocol enhancements: Revisions | Project Tracker |
| Configuring multi-site collections | Integrations (REDCap, EPIC, Instruments, etc.) |
| Container enhancements | DB management via UI |
| Queries, Dashboards & Catalogs | Legacy data migrations |
Customer Feedback Session
We conducted a feedback session for the attendees to propose enhancements and discuss pain points. The feedback collated from this session will be used to plan the scope of future releases.
Please write to us at [email protected] to suggest improvements for the next conference.