The national MERIT network held a meeting on the morning of June 30, as a satellite of JOBIM 2026 in Strasbourg, where each local bioinformatics network from across France was given a few minutes to describe what it does, how many people it reaches, and what has or hasn’t worked. We could see how differently these networks have developed from one city to the next. Quite an instructive session!
Some of them date back to 2015 or earlier; ours in Lyon is one of the youngest, with a mailing list only created in May 2024, but it grew quickly, as shown below:
Cumulative number of subscribers to the reseau_bioinfos_lyonnais mailing list. The annotated events are: the first public announcement of the network (July 2024), the first physical meeting (September 2024), and the first plenary meeting (December 2024). The sharp rise in October–November 2024 coincides with the call for that plenary meeting.
The message from the curve is straightforward: we grow when we do something, and we plateau when we don’t. Every visible step upward corresponds to an email sent or a meeting organised. Since early 2025, the curve has barely moved, which simply means that everyone who already knew about us has subscribed, and the rest haven’t heard of us yet.
We currently stand at 177 subscribers from a wide range of institutions, across the Lyon area and beyond. That’s a solid base, but the Lyon bioinformatics community is considerably larger than 177 people.
After Strasbourg, the conclusion is obvious: time to advertise again. A new round of outreach is coming. In the meantime, if you have a colleague in the area who isn’t on the list yet, point them our way: it only takes a click to subscribe !