OpenWetWare:Presentations/iGEM 2006 Teach the teachers workshop

Randy Rettberg asked if we would be interested in giving a short presentation on OWW at the iGEM Teach the Teacher's workshop on May 6 at MIT. Essentially it would involve introducing OWW and describing how it is a useful resource to iGEM folks.

See the iGEM wiki for information on what iGEM is and the workshop.

Introduction to OpenWetWare
What is a OWW, why is it useful?


 * Started by students in the Endy and Knight labs as a means of recording and sharing useful biological information.
 * Addresses the problem of the lack of a searchable, accessible knowledgebase for experimental methods, as well as provides a new venue to communicate and collaborate with others about research ideas and projects.
 * Now consists of ~55 labs from 30 institutions.
 * ~7000 total pages, more than 100 protocols, 75 materials pages, and 50 equipment pages.

How is OpenWetWare useful for iGEM teams?

 * Q&A / Experimental troubleshooting
 * There is an active community of helpful researchers as well as existing resources on the site:
 * BioBricks
 * Useful facts
 * Tutorials
 * Protocols, Materials and Equipment
 * Strong synthetic biology presence on the site (it is the home of syntheticbiology.org).
 * Custom extensions
 * Automatic Pubmed citations via Biblio.
 * Recent changes filtering. See  iGEM on OWW recent changes.
 * Easy adding of plots and chemistry diagrams (in progess)


 * By forging links between iGEM and OpenWetWare, we hope to
 * integrate iGEM participants more tightly with the research community
 * create ongoing resources stemming from iGEM for the synthetic biology research community

How is OpenWetWare useful for labs?

 * Enables the lab web page to remain very up-to-date and dynamic, as well as allows lab members to engage a larger community of potential collaborators than are normally available.

things that you do already offline but might be more effective on the wiki
 * meeting organization (lab meetings (1,2), retreat planning (1,2), etc)
 * ordering
 * lab jobs (1, 2, 3)
 * equipment pages
 * control experiments, etc.

things you may not do currently, but which are easy on a wiki
 * long term storage of lab information (protocols, primers, restriction enzymes)
 * Helps with the rapid turnover of personel in labs, collaborative protocol editing tunes protocols used by several lab members, searchable, information.
 * up-to-date, high content level lab webpage
 * remove the webmaster "bottleneck" - democratized contribution

unique opportunities on OpenWetWare
 * publicize your work, prior to publication
 * OWW will probably be the top google hit for your name
 * collaborate
 * find out what people are doing right now across the world or just downstairs
 * shared spaces
 * Shared protocols, materials, equipment, etc.
 * protocol example

How to get started on OWW

 * Getting started: a quick guide to using OpenWetWare.