Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg/Collaborations

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Collaboration
Who we worked with

SUMMARY

An important part about iGEM is to able to work with other teams, to share your knowledge as well as learn from others and do this to solve an existing problem which typically is difficult to solve by your own. These collaborations can be long, broad and difficult such as making a serious stand or change for the environment, but can also very short temporary like sharing quick knowledge and tips about a subject. The collaborations can involve just two teams, or several 100 teams depending on the task at hand and what the teams intend to accomplish.

In our team we have made several collaborations; longer collaborations with fewer teams involved but where constant communication has been required, and shorter collaborations were several teams from around the world have gathered to contribute to a single problem.



Long Term Collaborations

This year we have had two longer collaborations; one which extended to a partnership which was our last year’s respectively teams started which we then continued, and one collaboration where we took help from another team to host an event.

Team:UNILausanne


Team:UNILausanne and us have worked during the year in creating and spreading science in a simple and accessible manner. We do this by hosting a blog which content is made accessible and readable for the general public, this includes posting the blog posts in several languages, keeping the blog completely free for readers, and purposely writing the texts at a simple language, explaining scientific words and concepts. We have also continuously spread the content and the word of the blog while for instance visiting high schools, posting on social media and handing out flyers. Much more information about us and our collaboration with UNILausanne can be found on or partnership page.

Team:Linköping-Sweden


While our collaboration with Team:Linköping-Sweden was shorter, lasting only for about two months the work we did was more intensive and required more frequent contact as well as it brought us as teams much closer. Together with Team:Linköping-Sweden we hosted the Nordic iGEM Conference (NiC), an event which brings all Nordic iGEM teams together for 2-3 days of presentations, events and meet-up. While the actual event was located in our city, Gothenburg, and it required more preparations and logistics from our team, Team:Linköping-Sweden did an extensive part in planning the event and prepping smaller events like a workshop during the conference.

Most years the hosting team of NiC is decided by a competition held within the days of the event. This year NiC was more in the open air due to covid, and due to the fact that last year's NiC were cancelled. We had already begun planning a similar event when we first heard of NiCs existence, and quickly grabbed the ‘rights’ to host it when others passed on the opportunity. But with no previous information on how the usual NiC event is constructed, we had to do much from scratch. Doing this was obviously hard, especially considering that we were only eight people in the team where most of us were consistently occupied with other work, such as lab work which required an extensive amount of time even during the event. Thus, we reached out to other Nordic iGEM teams, where Team:Linköping-Sweden quickly responded.

The contact between Team:Linköping-Sweden and us consisted mostly of weekly meetings, where most planning and discussions about the events’ content was decided. Both Team:Linköping-Sweden and us each planned a workshop, brought in guest lectures and judges which helped us decide on the winner of the NiC competition. While most logistics and costs, including planning for those were covered by us, Team:Linköping-Sweden helped us greatly in setting everything up and receiving the guests.

From NiC we gained several useful things, ideas for our lab project but also ideas for outreach, human practices and also general experiences. The weekly meetings also continued after NiC for a shorter period, not so much for work anymore but now more as a newly found relationship.

You can read more about the NiC event on our NiC page.


Short Term Collaborations

In addition to our two long-term collaborations, we have also been a part of several small collaborations with different iGEM teams from around the world. These collaborations mainly consisted of making a short video, answering a poll or questionary or writing a short text. While some of them were mostly for fun, other collaborations were directly contributing to a team’s project, or in some other way a contribution to the global SGD goals and gender equality. Below are summaries of the different small collaborations we have taken part in.

Team:Stockholm


This year's team from Stockholm, Sweden, decided to update a Human Practice handbook which originate from the Stockholm team of 2017, which also can be read about on their website. For the handbook, which is made to help iGEM teams realise and plan their human practices initiatives, we contributed with our knowledge and experience about how to arrange and execute a semi-live event. While most countries are slowly opening up during the pandemic, hosting big get-together events can still be tricky and in some cases are better let to still be online or partly online. In our case we let NiC (see long collaborations or our NiC page) be a semi-live event, where we let Swedish teams send a limited number of people to join live, and asked the rest of the Nordic countries to simultaneously host an event in their country. The other Nordic teams then joined the main event online from their respective country. The events were then streamed online, recorded, and uploaded to Facebook and Youtube so it was accessible and distributed to the general public.

Hosting such an event can be tricky, and in the handbook we offered as much advice as we could come up with, including a timeline of the event, how to plan for the event and good things to keep in mind. The handbook can be found on team: Stockholms wiki, or here.

Team:Patras


Aiming to shed light on the sustainability goals we took part in a collaboration with Team:Patras, where we reasoned about the sustainability goals (SGD) our project would impact. We felt this could be a perfect opportunity as our project can have a great impact on environmental problems, as we aim to synthetically produce palm oil which currently is extracted from palm trees. While the collaboration simply included the making of a short video, it helped us reason more about the impact our project can have, and how it relates to goals which our society aims to achieve. Also, the collaboration in itself is a wonderful way to display the joint impact that iGEM and synthetic biology can have for our society, which we applaud Team:Patras for.

Mail iGEM Patras

Team:HKBU


While the details are spared to our partnership page, one part of our blog is to translate the posts into various languages such that as many people as possible, even none-English speakers can read them and understand them. While both we and Team:UNILausanne (owners of the blog) knows several different languages, we of course do not know them all. As such we looked for other teams from around the world to contribute with translations and their own blog posts. This not only helped us reaching more people, but also gave iGEM teams a platform to spread their project if they wanted to. Team:HKBU was quick to respond and contributed with both translations to Chinese (traditional and simplified) and their own post, where they wrote about what they did. The post Team:HKBU posted was both well written and interesting, be sure to check it out!

Teams Patras, Thessaloniki, ULaval and Concordia_Montreal


Diversity, equality, and inclusivity has in general always been an issue even within scientific areas, as such Teams Patras, Thessaloniki, ULaval and Concordia_Montreal created Rosalind Chronicles, a joint collaboration to celebrate women in STEM from all around the world! The idea was simply to have every participating team send in an image of future women in STEM (the women in their respective teams) and one image of an awesome, inspiring woman from their city who has made contribution in their own way to the society, as well as a text why we chose her. All these contributions will then be put on a joint bulletin board. While we in Gothenburg have no shortage of such awesome women, we chose none other than (drum role....)

Julie Rowlett!! Coolest mathematician ever; can’t really explain how awesome and cool she is which of course made her an obvious choice. Our tribute to her can of course be found on the bulletin board, but we also do recommend to check her website out, it is as enjoyable as impressive!

Team:Düsseldorf


Team:Düsseldorf has started a multi-joint collaboration where more than 70 teams participated in creating their own postcards. These postcards included a representative or fun image about each team's project, accompanied with a small text explaining their project, and is sent to Team:Düsseldorf which prints them and send them back. The twist is that each team then get a copy from all participating teams. These can then be distributed around each team home city, effectively spreading iGEM and synthetic biology in a fun and original way! Genius!
Postcards made by Team:Düsseldorf, and designed by all participating teams.

Team:Goparissaclay & Team:TAS_Tapei


Collaborations is all about giving and receiving, helping and getting help to jointly become better. Sometimes it is difficult for instance to come up with new ideas or get different kind of data, especially from people. A great way to receive more data is then of course to send out polls. Since we know that such information is highly appreciated, we answered a few of them along the way, helping fellow iGEM teams:
answered a poll about endometriosis from Team:Goparissaclay
a poll about donating blood from Team:TAS_Tapei

Team:Darmstadt, Team:Nantes, & Team:Reconby-iGEM-Unizar


IGEM is not only work but it should also include fun moments, where teams can come together and collaborate on something simple yet fun. Two simple collaborations we did was with Team:Darmstdt and Team:Nantes that included making two short videos; one where we simply caught and threw a paper airplane forward (Darmstadt) and one video where we simply made a greeting in our own language (Nantes). All participating teams' videos where then added together in larger inclusive videos. A third small, fun collaboration was with Team:Reconby-iGEM-Unizar, who created a Spotify playlist from iGEM teams to highlight local artists, where we contributed with a song. View Team:Nantes video here and Team:Darmstadt video here, and lastly the Spotify list here.