Team:DTU-Denmark/Inclusion

• IIT-Madras
• Inclusive policies and behaviour
• Wiki accessibility
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Inclusion - helping others access the synthetic biology community

This year, we got the chance to help a group of people take part in iGEM who would otherwise not have been able to do so. This happened after our iGEM supervisor was contacted by the supervisor of IIT-Madras about a possible collaboration early in the year. The two teams had a virtual meetup where we exchanged information about our respective projects and a few ideas on a possible collaboration. In the past year, their team had been working with the filamentous fungus Fusarium solani. Thus their team had expertise in this area and could provide our team with valuable information for our project. Our team therefore initiated a collaboration with their team, however, unfortunately, we later found out that their team had to withdraw from this year's iGEM competition due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.

As we all wanted IIT-Madras to have a chance to contribute to the iGEM 2020 competition, both teams agreed to a collaboration. This collaboration was based on the IIT-Madras team helping our team in three main areas: Drylab, Outreach and Human Practice. In return, our team agreed to honour their contribution with complete transparency of our project and acknowledging their work and participation.

Both teams also held multiple virtual meetups and made a formal contract for this collaboration, clearly stating the working expectations from both parties. It was agreed that their team would assist our subgroups with different tasks, while also acting as consultants for our team. Their team showed their contribution in following areas:

We are excited that we were able to work with this team and help them maintain a clear connection to the iGEM competition in this difficult time. Our team would like to express gratitude to the IIT-Madras team for their help and contribution and for bringing a positive spirit to the iGEM community. We hope to see them again at iGEM in the future.

Inclusive policies and behaviour

As an overgrad team from an engineering university, one might think that team members would be very similar in most ways. That is not the case for our team - the only common factor for all of us is that we currently study something related to synthetic biology. Team members come from a range of academic and social backgrounds, including education and the arts, and our ages span 16 years. Members represent a range of sexual orientations and we use inclusive language when talking about relationships - eased by Danish having a gender-neutral term for romantic partners.

We are very aware of being respectful of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds as well as health issues, ensuring that all members of the team feel welcome. When interacting with the public we have tried to be inclusive towards people from different walks of life, being careful to explain technical terms and showing that everyone is welcome. Also, we have tried to be very aware of including people who do and don’t drink alcohol. This may not seem important but due to the culture around alcohol consumption in Denmark non-drinkers often feel excluded at social events.

In terms of gender, our team is comprised of more than 60% females. We have been very aware of making sure that both membership and leadership of team subgroups is distributed between members of different genders. To ensure that people do not feel unduly pressured when making decisions, we instituted secret ballots for major decisions. In addition, policies for dealing with issues related to health, including mental health, were established at the very beginning of the project period.

Wiki accessibility

Accessibility on the web is important, therefore we took steps to ensure that our wiki was accessible for people with various disabilities. The colour scheme viridian used in our plots, was chosen as not only being visually pleasing to people with regular color vision, but also to be viewable for people with a variety of color vision deficiencies (color blindness) (Rudis et al., 2020). We furthermore chose a screen reader friendly font. Consideration was also given to font choice and size, figure shapes and sizes, and amount of white-space to make our wiki accessible to a wide audience.