Team:William and Mary/OutreachDatabase




Summary
iGEM has established an infrastructure to ensure that scientific research is rigorously characterized, accessible, and centralized on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The iGEM program also emphasizes the value of outreach, encouraging teams to implement meaningful human practices projects. We aim to expand the infrastructure of sharing and building on past projects to the human practices aspect of iGEM. To that end, we have created a comprehensive database that includes outreach projects done by gold-medal teams in the past two years. The approximately 1,500 entries are in a standardized format that makes it easy to assess and compare projects. Additionally, each entry contains descriptive tags, enabling users to search for specific project categories. We hope to establish this database as a central part of iGEM, encouraging teams to reflect and build upon past projects and document future outreach to ensure that iGEM is a continuous force for innovation and progress in outreach.
Introduction
iGEM has strong infrastructure to ensure that teams can easily share the products of their scientific research with other teams and scientists. The Registry of Standard Biological Parts encourages teams to rigorously characterize projects in a way that makes them replicable, or in a way on which other teams may build. These ideas of replicability and iterative progress are central to the scientific process.
The iGEM program places a strong emphasis on human practices by having teams reflect upon how their work will impact the world, and how the world can impact their work. Many iGEM teams have created and implemented outstanding human practices projects that they have documented on their wikis. While the expectation exists that human practices projects should be well-documented and an important part of iGEM projects, the infrastructure for outreach does not currently exist in the way that it exists for the scientific research. This also means that there is not as much incentive for teams to present their work with enough rigor and detail for others to replicate or build on their outreach projects.
Our goals in creating the database are the following:
  1. Centralize and make more accessible the [not sucking up description word] outreach projects that happens through the iGEM program
  2. Present outreach projects in a more standardized way that makes them easier to compare and evaluate
  3. Make it easier for future iGEM team to build off past projects and make improvement on existing ideas
  4. Analyze recent past outreach and make suggestions for improvement based off findings
Explanation of the structure and content
Our intention with the database entries is not to have a comprehensive explanation of each outreach project. Rather, we want it to act as a basic description, but have the wiki be the more detailed source of information for each project. This is for two reasons. First, teams made their wiki entries themselves and it is the most accurate representation of their outreach projects. Second, database entries are meant to be concise summaries of projects that can be used more easily. We wanted to avoid overcomplicating them by including too much information. Therefore we chose to classify projects by basic project information, project characteristics, and outcomes.
Basic Project Information: This is information that all outreach projects should have. It includes the school name, school section, year, outreach category, and the title of the outreach project.
Project Characteristics: Information that is descriptive and could be obtained prior to the project. It documents the aims of the project but does not provide information as to what happened. We met with Dr. Monica Griffin, the professor in charge of the community-based research and engagement program at the College. She suggested making categories for audience and objectives, where the objectives are listed as simple steps to complete the project, making them more replicable. Lastly, we also chose to include “products,” or a tangible pdf, document, video, or other ____ that helps improve the replicability of projects and publicize information that could be useful for other iGEM teams.
Project Results: Post-project information that helps characterize its efficacy. After consulting with Dr. Griffin, we decided to include data, reach, and analysis. Data is a tool to evaluate outreach effectiveness, and a way to see impact on the audience. The reach gives a metric for someone else to be able to assess the magnitude of impact. Analysis is the team’s own assessment of the outreach events, and could include suggestions for improvement.
Consultation with HQ
Before proceeding with our database entries, we consulted Todd Kuiken from the Human Practices Executive Committee to learn more about the goals of the committee for improving human practices and to get feedback on our project idea. Mr. Kuiken told us that for the 2017 year, the committee is trying to make human practices projects more accessible on wiki by having projects on pages with specific links. Additionally, they compile past exemplary projects for other teams to use to get started on their own outreach. We think the database addresses both of these ideas in a more comprehensive way and on a larger scale; it helps centralize outreach projects and is a resource of iGEM teams to look at past outreach. Mr. Kuiken also talked to us about being more inclusive of Integrated Human Practices projects, as these should be unique between teams, should never be exactly replicated, and cannot be documented in the same way as an Education and Public Engagement project would be. As a response, we added the IHP data type to better include data gathered during Integrated Human Practices projects that changed the course of the team’s research.
Process of Data Entry and Using the Database
After talking to HQ, we went ahead with our data entry. Because there is currently no consistent, standardized format for documenting human practices projects, our team documented projects manually. During data entry, we tried to keep wording and information consistent with the wikis. We also created project, product, audience, and goal tags based on what we saw present in the database. Later, we edited entries and made sure tags were consistent. By the end of the process, we had reached about 1500 separate projects across 233 teams. We finished the database toward the end of our project, but it was immensely helpful in planning our NOVA Labs outreach event.
Recommendations for the future
The database for 2015 and 2016 teams exists permanently on our wiki, and the Excel file of the database is attached to this page. Additionally, teams can update their past projects or submit new projects using the Google Form below.
We publicized the database and gave the opportunity for 2017 teams to submit projects, but we want to make this part of the iGEM process-- just as all teams are required to submit a new part to the registry and characterize a new or existing part in the registry, they should also be required to submit their outreach project to the outreach registry. We want to make it require a low level of maintenance; it took us long time to compile the entire database, but it should only take a team about 20 minutes to submit their own outreach projects.