Productive connections in the global Nextflow community forged by co-working

A group of Nextflow enthusiasts will come together in Sydney to take part in the global nf-core hackathon in March. By hosting the first Australian satellite site, we hope to unlock new opportunities for both national and international collaboration.

The global nf-core community curates a set of open‑source analysis pipelines built using Nextflow and they connect regularly through in person and online events. For the first time, the international hackathon’s network of live sites is extending to Australia, with the Australian outpost of the 2025 nf-core hackathon facilitating participation during our waking hours across 24-26 Mar 2025. The group will work on a variety of projects including development of training materials and nf-core workflows alongside our five local Nextflow Ambassadors and their international colleagues.

BioCommons’ Product Manager, Bioinformatics Platforms, Dr Ziad Al Bkhetan is a Nextflow Ambassador who has experienced the value of forging strong relationships in the global Nexflow community. In his work leading the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service, Ziad identified that Proteinfold, an existing nf-core pipeline for Protein 3D Structure prediction, had great potential for Australian researchers. 

Ziad identified several ways to improve Proteinfold and connected with the original developers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Spain, to reconfigure the workflow, add new features, and contribute the updates back to nf-core. Ziad’s demonstration of the new tool at the last Nextflow Summit created excitement in the Nextflow community. Seqera, the team behind Nexflow, was delighted that their community-driven approach is resulting in new tools being developed by people at the research interface. CRG was pleased to see that their contribution to the community facilitated a new working relationship between their Spanish biomedical research institute and Australian BioCommons. Ziad and the team from CRG will continue to work on their workflow at the nf-core hackathon, and welcome contributions from any other community members. 

We’re looking forward to connecting with the Seqera team and international peers at the nf-core hackathon to develop workflows and training materials  asynchronously. There is a growing list of projects being proposed and we can expect that the range will expand as teams around the world get to work.

Finding the right collaborator can fast track a project like nothing else, and specialist fields of research almost guarantee your perfect match will be on the other side of the world. We’ve already seen how strategic events can bring global developer communities together to forge valuable new relationships in the Nextflow community, and hope to catalyse more of these opportunities. 

Let us know if you are interested in joining the nf-core hackathon: Australian Outpost.