Team:Marburg/Collaborations

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Collaborations

German Meetup

As this years Marburg iGEM Team 2018 had the honor to continue the tradition of our predecessors to host the german iGEM Meetup. The meeting was established to exchange experiences earned while participating in the competition as well as getting feedback about our projects from people with a fresh perspective.

People discussing at posters

Marburg is not only at the heart of Germany, but also a very charming city with a rich academic tradition while balancing at the cutting edge of Science. On Friday the 22th, the teams started arriving in Marburg, where our city's campground had been booked for the meetup. Quickly, the tents were set up and everyone settled in. After giving out some welcome gifts, a tour of the old town was undertaken. Small groups of iGEMees were led by a member of Marburg’s team to discover some hidden gems in the narrow alleyways between the medieval buildings.

The Marburg iGEM Team proudly presenting the meetups schedule

The next day, Saturday, started with a breakfast buffet at the great auditorium, followed by speakers from the German association of synthetic biology (GASB), crystals first, a startup, and Rüdiger Trojok, a well-known member of Germanys growing biohacker scene. To sharpen our presentation skills as well as getting fresh impulses and new directions beyond the current state of the projects, the participating teams brought posters with an outline of their work and preliminary results. All teams decided on interesting projects covering a wide range of topics, and presented those convincingly, resulting in a very stimulating atmosphere for all iGEMees. We want to thank all the people who came to our little town and made this weekend the great experience it was. We want to thank the teams from Bielefeld, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Erlangen, Darmstadt, Würzburg, Aachen, Hamm Lippstadt, München, Tübingen, Stuttgart, Göttingen and our visitor from Taiwan for attending! We are looking forward to seeing you again in Boston!

Group photo by the riverside

Accessible Wiki - The Collaboration

We didn’t want to stop at designing our own wiki barrier-free to make the results of the iGEM competition accessible to everyone. Because, let’s face it, there are many more amazing and interesting projects out there. This is why we decided to encourage other teams to design their wiki accessible, too. By participating in this collaboration, all parties benefit. Firstly, people with vision impairment can access the web pages easily. Secondly, the teams create a broader audience for their results. Lastly and most importantly, this collaboration is spreading awareness to the issue of an inclusive society that is long overdue.

For this to happen, we put together a guide containing the basic criteria needed for an accessible website. Click here to get to our accessible wiki guide. After spreading our campaign over social media we contacted over 80 teams in personal messages. Interestingly, the majority of the other teams had never heard of accessible web design. Some did and had already implemented some criteria into their wiki.

Participating Teams:

iGEM Barcelona who designed their wiki accessible for colour-blind people. Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM Chalmers Gothenburg who designed all their graphics accessible using alternative text. Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM KCL who met some of the criteria stated in our guide. Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM Purdue who met many of the criteria found in our guide. Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM Sorbonne U Paris who met a lot of criteria stated in our guide. Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM Westminster UK who designed their wiki partly accessible. Click here to learn more about their project!

When contacting the iGEM team of the Kings College in London, our call for an accessible iGEM competition was met with a (to us) new idea. KCL has a public campaign in which they ask to design websites accessible for people with special educational needs (sen). We were happy to participate in their campaign. It’s just as easy to design your wiki suitable for sen people as it is to design a wiki accessible for people with visual impairment!

To conclude, through this collaboration with all these amazing teams, we could improve the Human Practices part of our project by spreading awareness on the inclusion of people with disabilities into the scientific community. For the future, we hope for the iGEM community to adopt this design and by this to be a shining example for the rest of the scientific and general public. One possibility to do this could be to embrace accessible web design as a medal criterium or a requirement in general.

iGEM Duesseldorf - Postcards

iGEM Duesseldorf wanted to create a co-culture toolbox. With their project “Trinity” they want to make microbial-communities usable for diverse purposes. Since 2016, iGEM Düsseldorf is doing a postcard campaign with the purpose of educating the public about topics in synthetic biology. We were happy to join and designed a postcard which fit with our project. #vibriGAINZ. When the postcards from teams all over the world arrived we were delighted to see the work everyone put into them. Additionally, by this we got interested in all those teams and had a further look into their project

Click here to learn more about their project Trinity!

B. Marchal