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
  1. integrate iGEM participants more tightly with the research community
  2. 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.