Articles

Articles about The Whole Project

"Laborwelt.de" is an online magazine which focuses on scientific issues. We cooperated with them and they gave us the opportunity to post about the progress of our project every week on their Facebook page (1000 likes). We made more than 12 posts to inform the readers about our work in the lab and other events. You can take a look at their page Laborwelt.de. "Laborwelt" is a also a print magazine in Germany. It is published every quarterly with a run of 20,000 copies.

"Jetzt.de", a part of the "Sueddeutsche Zeitung" (very popular newspaper in Germany), wrote an article about us and iGEM. It is the biggest online youth magazine in Germany that has more than 400,000 users monthley and 1,000,000 visitors. Here you can read the article (page 4) [1]. In this article, projects of young scientists are described. Our project is headed "The Miracle Yeast" and it tells about us and what we want to do. Besides we are the only iGEM Team mentioned in this article.

"biotechnologie.de" is another popular scientific homepage in Germany. It belongs to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In the context of the "Action Day" of all German iGEM Teams, a detailed article was published about iGEM and every German iGEM Team [2].

Last but not least our project was presented on the homepage of the Technical University of Munich [3]. Besides the article was also added to the newsletter which was sent to all students of the university. The pictures of us with traditionally Bavarian clothing were made by a professional photographer of the TU Munich.

Articles after The Europeen Jamboree

Biotechnologie.de presented an article about the German teams which advanced to Boston directly after the Jamboree.
One of our Teammembers was interviewed and quoted in the article. Besides, the projects of the five German teams were described and explained.
At the 23rd of October we had a visitor from the Deutschlandfunk. He made an interview with us for the radio station which will be aired during the jamboree. Four of team members reported on the project our human practice events and showed our brewing experiment.
Furthermore the Sueddeutsche visited us in the lab at October 24th and asked us some questions about the project. The article will be online as soon as possible.
Last but not least biotechnologie.tv interviewed on of our members via Skype for almost one hour. This interview is now in the postproduction and will be online at the 5th of November. Biotechnologie.tv belongs to biotechnologie.de and therefore is an initiative of the federal ministry of education and research.
It was overwhelming how big our outreach was after the European jamboree. We were prod that we could help to explain SynBio in a way that the public understands it and therefore help to increase the acceptance of genetic engineering in Germany.

Articles about The Panel Discussion

This article published on September 20th, 2012, gives a short summary about our panel discussion [4]. It states that the green biotechnology is controversial, but the red biotechnology is rather accepted in Germany. Yet it also mentions that there were many supporters of green biotechnology at the discussion and that most of the invited guests supported it, too. In general, the whole event was really informative and enjoyable. One of the participants of our panel discussion, Peter Warlimont (SPD), wrote about his impressions of the evening [5]. He is still rather skeptical about green biotechnology, but honors the enthusiasm of the students and scientists.

Most of our publicity was done in the Internet, mainly on Facebook. The outreach of this social network is larger than any other. That is why we used it for contacting the populace. During our main working time in August, over 9000 people were reached by our posts. Besides, our homepage was an important information source and other iGEM teams followed us mainly on twitter. A blog completed our "Public Relation" work. We had around 1000 page views in 4 months. All in all it is to say that we were present on a broad range of social media to have a big outreach.

Facebook

100 people liked our Facebook page,this is an increase of ten people, because before the Jamboree we only had 88 likes. During one week (20th to 26th August) we reached 9046 people with our account. After the Europeen Jamboree we had a big increase in visitors. In the picture below you can see the statistics of our Facebook page. The blue line represents the number of people we reached, the green one the number of people who talked about us and the purple line stands for the number of our posts. The number of friends of fans is 23524. These are the people who could see our posts when they open up their facebook profile. 10 is the number of people who talked about us, and 412 is the reachout of the last week. We are sorry that it was not possible to create this statistics page in English.

In the picture above you can see that our "outreach" is divided according to gender and age. We reached more men (down) than women (top) and people between 18 and 34 years were mostly reached.

Blog

This is our blog [6]. Overall we had 588 visitors from May 2012 to September 2012 and 1282 page views in general. This shows that our visitors wanted to be kept up-to-date and read our blog regularly. We honored this by writing a comment at least once a week.

Report on Our Panel Discussion

Many weeks before the panel discussion we did a lot of advertisement for this event. That is why articles were published on the homepage of the TUM [7] [8]. In addition external pages such as the Munich Biotechcluster posted invitations to our event [9]. On their website a comprehensive overview of the Munich Biotechnology community can be found. The same article was posted on the website of the LMU because they worked together with us on the action day [10]. Of course we also posted an event on Facebook to invite people [11].

This is the official invitation:

Homepage

Our homepage informs about all aspects of our project [12]. Moreover, there are also the links to our information "channels" and the outline of the project and general information about iGEM is shown. Of course our sponsors are listed there, too. And last but not least, you can find many interesting links, for example a very good article about iGEM in a German magazine.

Twitter

Being consequent and choosing mainly online media for our representation, we also used a twitter account. All in all we have 111 followers. Besides, we tried to really stay updated here and had 119 tweets during our project.
We followed mainly the other iGEM Teams to stay updated about their progress. So we are informed about what they are doing and if they need any help or if we can join them by a human practice event. Moreover, it was a way of communication between the teams and of course sometimes inspiration.

References

• [1] http://jetzt.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/544866/4/1#texttitel
• [2] http://www.biotechnologie.de/BIO/Navigation/DE/root,did=153818.html
• [3] http://portal.mytum.de/ccc/newsletter/studierende/2012_03/02/
• [4] [http://www.merkur-online.de/lokales/freising/widerstand-gegen-gruene-gentechnik-waechst-weiter-2510648.html
• [5] http://www.peter-warlimont.de/index.php?nr=46952&menu=1
• [6] http://tum-igem2012.blog.de/
• [7] http://www.wzw.tum.de/index.phpid=189&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=418&cHash=966e4554a85d97bee8ae1d7d5c0c3d9
• [8] http://www.wzw.tum.de/fachschaften/biowiss/home/
• [9] http://www.m4.de/der-cluster/datenbanken/termindatenbank/details/8490.html?tx_biomdatabaseconnection_calendarevent%5Bis_search%5D=
• [10] http://www.uni-muenchen.de/aktuelles/news/2012/aktionstag_igem.html
• [11] https://www.facebook.com/events/180510918750781/
• [12] http://www.igem2012.de/