iGEM Copenhagen commits to publicly share our stories online
Why iGEM Copenhagen has set foot on Medium and what you can expect from us
iGEM is an international competition on the genetically engineered machines held annually. In this competition, university and high school students use their synthetic biology knowledge to engineer novel biological machines to solve any issues they are interested in.
iGEM encourages participating students to not only carry out scientific experiments but also engage and educate the public. The spotlight is now on all iGEM teams to spread the word of iGEM and synthetic biology to the world.
Our observations 🧐
All iGEM teams have been recording their work on their Wiki sites. They also have been forming bi-directional dialogues with the general public. So far, we have seen great stories shared across the entire community of iGEM. We are eager to join the party and share our stories too.
We heard exciting iGEM experience on the personal and team levels from our former peers. Despite its immense value, we don’t see much of such experience being told on the Internet though. We keep asking ourselves “can we share our fascinating iGEM experience globally, and not limited to those who are close to us?”.
We know that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make sharing information easy for us, and they give us opportunities to reach broad audience across the globe. A concerning issues, however, is that contents posted on these platform are ephemeral. They do not last long and usually we would not revisit them again after a few days. Search engines do not serve these social media contents on their search results either. That is, no one will find them and we risk losing potentially valuable information.
We want to see our contents reach a considerable number of readers, last long, and get recognised by search engines. We found that Medium fulfils our expectations. We have realised the potential of Medium, a modern publication platform for all sorts of readers and writers. Medium makes reading and writing particularly pleasing. Until now, there is no established iGEM publication on Medium, which seems unfortunate as Medium provides an exquisite platform to spread the knowledge.
Our missions 👊
We will document our work here in this Medium publication. On this platform, we will celebrate our successes and be open about our failures. We value openness because we believe that open communication and open research help move the world forward. We are here to learn how to communicate science to the public. We strive to improve our work, and hence, we welcome all forms of feedback.
We will share not only science part of our iGEM project but many other components that constitute our iGEM project. We want to keep the record of how we work as a team, how we approach certain problems, and how we solve them. We do not claim that our attempts are the best possibles. However, we would like to share one version of many possible approaches and, at the same time, we want to learn what we do right and wrong.
Our planned contents 📝
We have planned over a hundred articles to be written over the summer of 2018. They will follow these categories.
Our Project 🚀— (nearly) all the details about our iGEM project
Our Journey 👣— our experience on iGEM as a team and as a team member
Real Science 🔬— we will delve deeper into the core scientific constituents of our project
Science for the Public 🌍 — we would like to convey the coolness of our science to the public
Human Practices 👨👩👧👦— we will explore how our project has the impact on the human and gets influenced by the human
How We Work 🛠— we want to share the technical details on how we manage the team, and how we use various kinds of tools to facilitate our work
Our expectations 🌟
It is clear that our determination is to spread the word of iGEM and synthetic biology to the general public, university students, high school students, and other iGEM teams.
We wish that our written materials will be valuable to current and future iGEM teams. We would like to help budding teams set up their journey into iGEM; also we hope that experienced teams can guide us, and simultaneously find alternative approaches to iGEM.
We want to persuade our young fellows to join iGEM teams in the next years to come. On top of that, we would like to see new teams from every part of the globe participating in this exhilarating iGEM journey with us.
As written scripts transfer the knowledge of humankind from one generation to the next, we would very much hope that we can pass our knowledge to next years’ teams and the future generations of humanity.
To receive updates from us, please follow our Medium publication iGEM Copenhagen or visit medium.igem.dk from time to time.
