Members might be interested in the GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge which has just been launched http://www.gbif.org/page/62262 (to actually enter see http://gbif.challengepost.com/ ). There’s €30,000 in total prize money, and three months to develop an application, tool, or visualisation that makes use of GBIF-mediated data (if you make it through the first round at the end of three months, you get a few more months to perfect it in time for the finals). The judging panel includes a mix of GBIF-associated people like myself (I chair the GBIF Science Committee), and non-GBIF people such as Lucas Joppa from Microsoft, and Mark Klein from NatureServe.
Those of you who’ve worked with GBIF data may think of it as solely about distributional data for organisms, but I personally think that there’s a lot of scope for adding a phylogenetic perspective to that data. GBIF now also has imported several million geotagged GenBank sequences (albeit not with some issues). So if you have some cool ideas on how to link phylogeny, genomics, and geography, here’s a chance to realise those ideas (and maybe win some prize money).