Interoperability and implementation support continue to be community imperatives for GA4GH as detailed in the strategic roadmap. To continue helping GA4GH and the community in achieving these imperatives, GA4GH staff tech team (TT) would like to invite standards developers and implementers for an exciting hackathon.   

The hackathon encourages developers and implementers of GA4GH standards to join the TT in evolving the testing capabilities of the standards compliance suites. These compliance suites play a pivotal role in ensuring the interoperability and conformant implementation of the standards the community is actively creating and supporting. It also follows the open source policy followed by all collaborators of GA4GH. Through this hackathon, the team would also like to reduce barriers in testing implementations of GA4GH standards and help bring conformant products to the community.   

The team would be using the htsget standard's compliance suite as an illustration to drive the session, providing the participants with an overview of compliance suites, set up instructions, and walkthrough of the test writing process. The session will culminate with submission of test reports into the testbed and result verification. The session expects participants to have intermediate and higher skills with the following languages and tools:

• Python, setting up virtual environment  
• Docker
• GitHub
• Command line interface (CLI)   

Note: If you don’t have experience with the above mentioned technologies, please come along. We will pair you with groups who have these skills. We are keen to hear your ideas, thoughts and use cases in designing the testing framework around GA4GH standards implementation. 

Additionally, the hackathon would help collaborators in exploring other GA4GH available services such as the Service Registry, the GA4GH Verified Implementations proposal and the GA4GH centralised testbed infrastructure.