Team:Nanjing China Bio/Online

We conducted an online survey in order to find out how the iGEMers communicating and collecting information during the preparation of the competition. At first, we found problems when we entered the iGEM official website. It’s difficult or even impossible to log in. What are worse, some official information provided on the website could be edited by guests, and BioBricks provided by the iGEM committee which submitted by the previous teams failed to function. Many of our team members thought it essential to change this situation. Based on this idea, we created a questionnaire on surveymonkey.com and send emails to teams in Asia Division to invite them to fill in our questionnaire. In this way, we could get overall view of this phenomenon. Soon, we got a great deal of feedbacks from different teams. More than 80% of them thought it necessary to set up an exchange platform in the charge of the iGEM committee. We produced the following charts to show our results.






As can be seen from the first chart above, more than half of the competitors surveyed preferred to set up a forum as the exchange platform. Several people wish to build a social network like Facebook to realize the function of information exchange. In the second chart, we can see that more than one third of the iGEMers have found that parts provided by the official unable to work. This means that a considerable number of parts submitted by the previous teams are not qualified. The iGEM committee should establish an examining department to cut down the occurrence of such incidents.

In addition, the iGEMers under investigation also put forward numerous constructive comments according to our topic. For example, one of the respondents rise the problem that the long description of the BioBricks could not be revised when uploaded; another respondent thought it inappropriate for the official to change the assessment standards of the official awards frequently. In conclusion, we hope the iGEM committee can set up an exchange platform to enhance the communication between different teams and check the validity of the parts submitted.