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📣 NEW: BEP Community Meetings

We're starting a quarterly BEP Community Meeting to help extension proposals move faster, stay coordinated with each other, and get consistent support from the maintainers. Everyone is welcome and we especially encourage BEP leads and anyone with a major change request for an ongoing BEP to join.

What it is

A 90-minute online meeting, split two ways:

  • short (each ≤5 min) updates from active BEPs.
  • discussion and resolution of a few cross-cutting issues.

First meeting

October 1st 2026 3pm UTC, Zoom link

If you lead a BEP please add your update to the shared template before the call (Slide template). Only BEPs with changes or an ask will present live but every BEP should fill in the one-slide status so the community has the full picture.

Want an issue discussed? Nominate it using the label community-meeting on the respective BIDS repository on GitHub. The repo carrying the issue/ PR must be under the bids-standard GitHub organization, otherwise it won’t be added to the BIDS GitHub project from which maintainers will choose the issues to be discussed. Labels exist in all BIDS GitHub repos already.

📣 BIDS is looking for a volunteer Communications Maintainer

We are looking for someone who is enthusiastic about community building and would like to help coordinate BIDS communications and community-facing activities.

This role would suit someone who communicates clearly and inclusively, enjoys connecting people and information, and is proactive about creating structure and following up so that important updates do not fall through the cracks. The Communications Maintainer's main areas of responsibility would be to:

  • Coordinate and share announcements across BIDS channels (mailing lists, Mattermost, social media, and the website) about releases, community meetings, workshops, BEP review periods, elections, governance updates, and opportunities to contribute.
  • Help coordinate the communications and community-events calendar, supporting activities such as meetings, town halls, workshops, elections, and the onboarding of new maintainers.
  • Strengthen the flow of information between the BIDS community, Maintainers, Steering Committee, and BEP leads by surfacing questions and requests, sharing relevant updates, and helping ensure that contributors receive timely follow-up.

This is a collaborative coordination role, not a one-person communications team. The Communications Maintainer would work with current BIDS maintainers and help develop practical processes and tools for more consistent, timely, and transparent communication.

Interested, curious, or know someone who may be a good fit? Please contact Eric Earl eric.earl@nih.gov or Martin Norgaard martin.noergaard@di.ku.dk. We would also appreciate you sharing this call with your networks.

BIDS will be at the OHBM BrainHack in Bordeaux!

We are excited to announce that BIDS will be at this year's BrainHack in Bordeaux, June 11-13!

If you'll be at BrainHack, please get involved! There are a few things planned:

We'd like to group BIDS-related project pitches on the first day. If you're planning on pitching one, you should:

  • Register your project on the BrainHack web page
  • Add one (1) slide to the project pitches section of our slide deck. In order to respect the time of BrainHack attendees, we will limit our pitches to 1 slide and 1 minute each.

We are also going to have TrainTrack sessions on the afternoon/evening of Day 2, June 12. Tentatively, we'll have three afternoon sessions:

Time Title Description
1:30-2:15 Introduction/Getting started with BIDS This will be a presentation put together by the BIDS maintainers and steering groups
2:20-3:05 Getting involved with BIDS The second session will discuss ways of contributing to the BIDS ecosystem, such as writing tutorials, libraries, BIDS Apps or BEPs. There will be a panel discussion where you have opportunity to ask any question you've ever wanted to ask!
3:10-3:55 Hands-on demos / Helpdesk / Q&A The third session will be an opportunity to have break-out sessions where people can demonstrate their tools, and others will be available to help people with general questions or specific problems
5:30-7:00 In-depth engagement or niche topics (e.g., BIDS schema) we intend to keep this relatively unstructured to allow for organic development

For these second and third sessions in particular, we'd love for any community members who will be attending the BrainHack to show up and share their perspectives, experience and tools. We frequently get asked how to convert data to BIDS, so BIDS converter tools are especially encouraged to add slides in the "Hands-on Demos" section.

If you have other ideas or would like to help in planning, please don't hesitate to reach out!

2025 07 31 steering group minutes

Agenda

  1. move to bids-standard.org

  2. Response to BIDS Townhalls 5 min

    do we have an estimate date on the rolling of the new BIDS website? [name=Camille] list of BEP statuses? [name=Yarik] commented https://github.com/bids-standard/bids-website/issues/673#issuecomment-3139948607

  3. Revitalize BIDS discussions w/journals 10 min

  4. Maintainers updates 10 min

    • Maintainers are back to regular meetings after on-boarding Ashley, Boris, and Yahya

    • Maintainers would like steering to weigh in on the modality and data types discussion - Issue #2108 - Oscar’s proposal - Yahya’s proposal

    • EBRAINS Summit/INCF BIDS Help Desk funding for Christine? - Cyril and Franco will be there.

    • From the town hall: steering should continue Ariel's work to try getting "BIDS datasets" to pass the BIDS validator for published papers

  5. Steering meeting over zoom Camille won't be able to join as of Sept :(

2025 07 03 bids town hall

Come share your views and learn more about how the BIDS project is developing

The 2025 virtual BIDS Town Hall happening on Wednesday, July 16 at 11:00 AM EDT (check your time here).

Hear more about our organizational updates, status updates from several of our BIDS extension proposals (BEPs), our community projects, and voice your thoughts about BIDS!

The event will take place fully virtually on the OSSIG Crowdcast platform at https://www.crowdcast.io/ossig2025

Please feel free to reach out to the BIDS Maintainers (bids.maintenance@gmail.com) with any questions.

2025 05 29 steering group minutes

Agenda

  1. OHBM Townhall 20 min

    • review plan and any slides for the townhall
    • SG please complete: slide 8 (heading: BIDS 2024-25 Other Milestones)
    • comments on orgnization or content? slides to cut?

  2. Response to MED regarding new format 5 min

  3. Maintainers updates 10 min

    • Maintainers need more members recruited

  4. (after end) Copenhagen Maintainers Meeting updates 15 min

2025 03 27 steering group minutes

Agenda

  1. Copenhagen maintainer meeting

  2. Follow up on cardiac BEP

  3. BEP045 (Physio)

    email from BEP045 (Physio), is input needed from steering?

  4. Maintainers Updates [name= all maintainers]

    • MEDD draft written. Does steering have a group account? Or who is sending?
    • New maintainer: Julia-Katharina Pfarr
    • Conflict of interest on BEPs
    • Status updates for BEPs being solicited