Revision as of 14:20, 26 September 2012

Collaborations

Our work

Our team has a strong belief that the best science is performed by working in groups. In this manner, collaboration between groups is highly attractive to us. However, given some circumstances this is difficult for us to perform. We identified that the lateness of wiki updates was a significant problem and did not make collaborating easier. While the wikis are very open, we felt more could be done to improve the sharing between teams.

The Macquarie team wanted to be involved in collaborations, however- our geographical location makes this difficult. We still wanted to work with and contribute to the community. To meet this goal we wanted to survey the community. We wanted to see if other groups want to work together and what their view on the iGEM experience was.

Our survey consisted of only nine questions and was mainly interested in the individual's perspective of collaboration.

We would like the thank the following teams for being involved in our survey, if you would like to participate then click here. Our initial results will be presented at the Asian Regional Jamboree.

Wiki Updating

In our experience we had found significant trouble in learning what other teams were doing. We believed this is due to teams spending a considerable amount of time in the lab, as well as the potential that they are working on the site offline and then pasting all the data as the freeze approaches.

The number of surveys filled out by teams from the Asia region was lower than expected considering it is the largest region. The surveys also contained contradictory information. Some members from the same team stated that the wiki was updated each week, whilst another stated it was in the week before the wikifreeze. The distribution show that the Asian region has significant delays in the posting of content compared to other regions, in particular East America and Europe. If iGEM were to place a greater emphasis on collaborations than the delay in wiki updates may hamper the Asian region.

Wiki and Open Source

The view on wikis was unanimous, they are functioning as expected and needed. The question was used to show that the spirit of iGEM revolves around communication and sharing of ideas. The responses per region did not change dramatically.

A collaboration Award

The idea for the survey was born from this question. Alongside Human Practice, helping another lab group (from our perspective this is collaboration) was a gold medal requirement. We then found it surprising that best collaboration is not eligible for a Special Award and yet best Human Practice is. Both are equally hard the judge. The Macquarie Team felt strongly that collaboration should be a bigger part of iGEM. Most worthwhile scientific endeavours benefit greatly from collaboration and we are excited for what future groups could produce collaborations were explored more.

The overwhelming majority of the community (83%, 99 responses) wanted to see an award for best collaboration. We, along with many other groups, felt that it would be hard to judge and would require the criteria to be carefully spelled out. This result was particularly exciting for the team as we found many responses that wanted to actively seek collaborations but found that seeking them were often very difficult. The lack of content on some teams wikis makes it difficult to determine what they are doing. Communication is also hard to establish and so teams often do not collaborate.

We would like to thank the following teams for participating in our survey, more than this may have completed the survey. However the wikifreeze has prohibited further work.

Alberta
Amsterdam
Arizona State
Bielefeld
Bordeaux
British Columbia
BYUprovo
Caltech
Chalmers-Gothenburg
Ciencias_UNAM
Colombia
Costa Rica_TEC-UNA
Edinburgh
Exeter
Frankfurt
Fudan_Lux
Georgia State
Groningen
HKUST_Hong Kong
HokkaidoU_Japan

INSA-Lyon
IvyTechSouthBendIN
JHU Igem wetware
Johns Hopkins Software
JUIT India
LYON INSA
Missouri Miners
Nanjing
Nevada
Northwestern
NYMU-Taipei
OUC-China
Panamá_INDICASAT
Paris Bettencourt
Paris Saclay
Peking University
Penn State
Queen's Canada
Stanford-Brown
SUSTC-Shenzhen-B

Tec-Monterrey
Trento
UBC iGEM 2012
UC_Chile
UIUC-Illinois
ULB-Brussels
Utah state
UTBC-RDC
Virginia
Wageningen_UR
Warsaw
Washington
Waterloo
Wellesley HCI
WHU-CHINA
ZJU-China

Our contributions

The Macquarie Team helped several other teams by completing their surveys. The teams we aided are listed below,

TU München

Trieste 2012

University of British Columbia

@@ Line 24: / Line 24: @@
 <p>The overwhelming majority of the community (83%, 99 responses) wanted to see an award for best collaboration. We, along with many other groups, felt that it would be hard to judge and would require the criteria to be carefully spelled out. This result was particularly exciting for the team as we found many responses that wanted to actively seek collaborations but found that seeking them were often very difficult. The lack of content on some teams wikis makes it difficult to determine what they are doing. Communication is also hard to establish and so teams often do not collaborate.</p>
 <hr>
-<h5>We would like to thank the following teams for participating in our survey, more than this may have completed the survey. However the wikifreeze has prohibited further work.
+<h5>We would like to thank the following teams for participating in our survey, more than this may have completed the survey. However the wikifreeze has prohibited further work.</h5>
 <center><table width=90%>
 <tr><td>
@@ Line 90: / Line 90: @@
 <hr>
 <h2>Our contributions</h2>
-<p>The Macquarie Team helped several other teams by completing their surveys. The teams we aided are listed below,
+<p>The Macquarie Team helped several other teams by completing their surveys. The teams we aided are listed below,</p>
 <blockquote><ul><li>TU München</li>
 <li>Trieste 2012</li>
 <li>University of British Columbia</li></ul></blockquote>

Team:Macquarie Australia/collaborations

From 2012.igem.org