Team:Edinburgh/HumanPractices/Initiatives


Team Edinburgh Finding NEMO

QUICK OVERVIEW OF

THE INITIATIVES CARRIED BY OUR TEAM

We collected the beliefs,values and ideas from the students MSc on Synthetic Biology and similar programmes by asking
  • "What do you think the biotech of the future should look like?"
  • "What values, ideas and themes bio-related professionals should adopt of following by the year 2030?"
And we collected the answer in a document in the format of a Manifesto

We analysed how iGEM teams and the iGEM community as a whole generate value by producing and improving knowledge and bridging the science-practice gap in the biotech Industry. The meta-analysis reflects on themes such as knowledge accumulation, openness, collaboration and organisational architectures/networks.

We engaged with a variety of stakeholders, in doing so we promoted synthetic biology iGEM and the SDGs, cultivated relationships and gathered useful insights.

We did internal surveys to comprehend the team's belief system on different themes reletad to biology and society

We created a biosensor themed FB group for iGEM teams to share information and resources

Upon request we shared lab protocols and the design of our biosensor with DIY-biologists, citizen scientists and iGEM teams, we did so by launching an Open Call on different social media

We were between the very first early users of JOGL and we created the first thematic iGEM group on the platform "The great iGEM biosensors Alliance". Similarly to the FB group, we tried to engage with the other iGEM teams with little success, on the bright side, we had interaction with different Citizen Scientists.

Knowing that iGEM teams usually possess a lot of knowledge (tacit and non-tacit) that is often lost between different editions of the competition we started a Collective Biosensor Manual to pass to the next wave of iGEMers, this crowd creation and crowd wisdom initiative will be still running after the wiki freeze HERE

After finding out that in some countries water quality reports of drinking water published by different authorities could be inaccurate and incorrect, we made a survey in 10 different languages (Chinese, Hindu, Russian, English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Romanian, Polish) asking people if they ever tried to get access to water quality reports made by their national and local authorities and water providers, as well as asking them if they trust the data fn the reports.
The survey served three goals, push and educate the surveyees on finding data about their drinking water, raise awareness about water-related issues and gathering precious data for Human Practices. The survey is still active.
HERE

Based on the information gathered by our research activities; mainly the meta-analysis and the interviews. We found some areas of improvement to present to the iGEM community and the iGEM Foundation. Namely, financial struggles of iGEM teams in paying the registration fees, inefficient collaborations, possible loss of knowledge between different editions of the competition, lack of representation from some regions.

During our project we looked at different regulations, at our surprise the EU is currently revising its Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, when we reached to EU officials to discuss the implication of the directive, an EU representative suggested us to participate in the public consultations. Therefore we extended such invitation to all the other European iGEM team and citizen scientists focusing on water-related issues. We hope to form some evidence-based policies to present by the next round of public consultations.

Initiative to collect all the data, design and results produce with our Bio platform
The page will work as a registry and working group and even if there are no members currently there are biologists trying our protocols that are willing to share their results. Stay tuned for more!
Making thousands of biosensors

This initiative was made to share all our data that has been collected with survey
iGEM teams consciously or unconsciously create huge data set that data scientists and policymakers could use
Roughly 20 iGEM teams that conducted surveys have been invited to join the initiative but the initiative needs more traction
JOGL Discussion about iGEM Meta-Analysis and Surveys

We made a Minecraft World to present our project to children and we later merged Nottingham's iGEM world with ours!

This year we started to make a Bplan based purely on Open source Business models to prove that iGEM teams could publish their results and make money without hard IP protection. The Bplan was a good exercise to think out of the box.

We had some interactions with actors in India and Bangladesh, these actors not only expressed their interest in using the biosensor locally between communities of people affected by their drinking water.
Therefore we drafted an initial Roadmap for an Outreach Programme
Unfortunately we didn't make much progress since we had very limited access to the lab and we didn't have a physical version of the biosensor until recently

Performed a virtual conference with the students from the Synbio society of our university. More than 15 people for a formal presentation and the subsequent Q&A session
All the areas of the project were discussed during the presentation and during the Q&A we gave practical advises on how to develop an iGEM project