Difference between revisions of "Team:Aalto-Helsinki/humhub"
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<p>Several members expressed their will not to use Facebook for various reasons, and along with personal reasons that many team members expressed, the fact that Facebook lacks key functions for streamlined collaboration and possibilities to customize. Discussions regarding other means of communication started and the idea of the Hub arose as a common place for teams to discuss and collaborate both within the team and with other teams.</p> | <p>Several members expressed their will not to use Facebook for various reasons, and along with personal reasons that many team members expressed, the fact that Facebook lacks key functions for streamlined collaboration and possibilities to customize. Discussions regarding other means of communication started and the idea of the Hub arose as a common place for teams to discuss and collaborate both within the team and with other teams.</p> | ||
− | <p>In Aalto-Helsinki, the team from last year had managed to continue a sponsorship to use Flowdock communication platform in 2015. They had started with it in 2014 and found it a good way to keep on track about the project. It doesn’t have similar problems as Facebook: as all of the team members were new to Flowdock, there was no extra clutter: everything that happened on Flowdock, had to do with the project. Emails and Tweets could also be forwarded to different subforums called “flows” to keep on track with other platforms as well. Some problems did however rise: as Flowdock was new to everyone in the team, it took some time to get used to checking it on a regular basis as well as organizing the information. You can create separate flows on Flowdock to discuss different things and tag people as well as discussion topics, but conversations have a tendency to get lost when many ongoing topics are discussed at the same time. For this reason, some of the team members tried to initiate the use of Facebook instead of Flowdock, but as the team was afraid of the same issues that Stockholm had run into, Aalto-Helsinki stuck with Flowdock. Another problem with Flowdock was that even though Aalto-Helsinki | + | <p>In Aalto-Helsinki, the team from last year had managed to continue a sponsorship to use Flowdock communication platform in 2015. They had started with it in 2014 and found it a good way to keep on track about the project. It doesn’t have similar problems as Facebook: as all of the team members were new to Flowdock, there was no extra clutter: everything that happened on Flowdock, had to do with the project. Emails and Tweets could also be forwarded to different subforums called “flows” to keep on track with other platforms as well. Some problems did however rise: as Flowdock was new to everyone in the team, it took some time to get used to checking it on a regular basis as well as organizing the information. You can create separate flows on Flowdock to discuss different things and tag people as well as discussion topics, but conversations have a tendency to get lost when many ongoing topics are discussed at the same time. For this reason, some of the team members tried to initiate the use of Facebook instead of Flowdock, but as the team was afraid of the same issues that Stockholm had run into, Aalto-Helsinki stuck with Flowdock. Another problem with Flowdock was that even though Aalto-Helsinki could use it for free, there was no way all iGEM teams could get Flowdock for free. For this reason, it is by no means a platform to collaborate with other teams, and the use of an additional communication platform for this purpose is inevitable.</p> |
</section> | </section> | ||
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<h2>Then there was the Hub</h2> | <h2>Then there was the Hub</h2> | ||
− | <p>Following the discussions within Team Stockholm, a network was set up by Hugi | + | <p>Following the discussions within Team Stockholm, a network was set up by Hugi using the open source <a href="https://www.humhub.org/>Humhub platform</a>. In many ways, the Hub mimics a regular social network. However, some functions have been added such as a better word processor. People can join different ’spaces’; One can for example make one space for each team, sub-team responsibility, such as wetlab work, cross team collaboration etc... In each space users are able to post text, pictures, links etc. to share with each other. People are also able to post to everyone in the ’Open Forum’, for example to request help or reach out for a certain collaboration.
</p> |
<p>Aalto-Helsinki and Stockholm set up their own collaboration space and kept in touch through the Hub. This report was also initiated through a discussion on the Hub itself.</p> | <p>Aalto-Helsinki and Stockholm set up their own collaboration space and kept in touch through the Hub. This report was also initiated through a discussion on the Hub itself.</p> | ||
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<section id="toolsmatter" data-anchor="toolsmatter"> | <section id="toolsmatter" data-anchor="toolsmatter"> | ||
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<h2>Tools matter</h2> | <h2>Tools matter</h2> | ||
<p>An example of how the Hub can be customized is how we integrated the ’Team seeker’ and ’Biobrick seeker’, made by Aalto-Helsinki 2014, into the Hub. They can now be used directly within the Hub. This allows users to search for other teams or Biobricks within the same working environment.</p> | <p>An example of how the Hub can be customized is how we integrated the ’Team seeker’ and ’Biobrick seeker’, made by Aalto-Helsinki 2014, into the Hub. They can now be used directly within the Hub. This allows users to search for other teams or Biobricks within the same working environment.</p> | ||
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+ | <figure style="float:right"> | ||
+ | <img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/f/f1/Aalto-Helsinki_humhub_teamseeker.png" style="width:400px;"/> | ||
+ | <figcaption>Aalto-Helsinki 2014's Team Seeker can be accessed directly from the Hub.</figcaption> | ||
+ | </figure> | ||
<p>The ability to customize the Hub according to the need of iGEM teams could be taken further by letting anyone design plugins, such as Helsinki’s seekers, to be integrated. As the whole system is open source, the whole system could be offered for users to modify completely and set up their own Hub for example to test new plugins or functions. These could later on be integrated in the main Hub.</p> | <p>The ability to customize the Hub according to the need of iGEM teams could be taken further by letting anyone design plugins, such as Helsinki’s seekers, to be integrated. As the whole system is open source, the whole system could be offered for users to modify completely and set up their own Hub for example to test new plugins or functions. These could later on be integrated in the main Hub.</p> | ||
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<p>The questionnaire consisted of multiple choice questions and aimed to gather information about the different platforms teams used to communicate with other teams and also how teams find each other to start collaborations. By August 5th 23 teams had replied to the questionnaire. Of these only one team felt there was no need for a better collaboration platform. This team used Facebook and email to stay in touch with their collaborating partners. 7 other teams also said they use Facebook and email (and Facebook and email only) to collaborate, but hoped for a better platform. This led us to believe that the wish for a new platform was not only due to the clutter of different platforms. Nearly half (11) of the respondents used more than two platforms, and we thought that they might be having some trouble juggling between the platforms. 17 of our respondents used social media to find the collaborating teams and 19 teams use social media as their collaboration platform (the only or among others).</p> | <p>The questionnaire consisted of multiple choice questions and aimed to gather information about the different platforms teams used to communicate with other teams and also how teams find each other to start collaborations. By August 5th 23 teams had replied to the questionnaire. Of these only one team felt there was no need for a better collaboration platform. This team used Facebook and email to stay in touch with their collaborating partners. 7 other teams also said they use Facebook and email (and Facebook and email only) to collaborate, but hoped for a better platform. This led us to believe that the wish for a new platform was not only due to the clutter of different platforms. Nearly half (11) of the respondents used more than two platforms, and we thought that they might be having some trouble juggling between the platforms. 17 of our respondents used social media to find the collaborating teams and 19 teams use social media as their collaboration platform (the only or among others).</p> | ||
− | <p>We | + | <p>We predict that this will make collaborating with e.g. Chinese teams very difficult, since they do not have access to Facebook, and instead use their own social media platforms. Facebook is also less common all around Asia than in Western countries. This disrupts the whole point of collaborating, as it is difficult to find teams around the world. From the survey respondees 6 teams did not collaborate, but 5 of these had looked for collaborators. All of these teams also replied that they had had problems contacting other teams. This is probably the main reason why they aren’t collaborating with anyone, but it might also be that they haven’t been able to find but a few interesting teams who unfortunately haven’t replied.</p> |
</section> | </section> |
Latest revision as of 06:43, 18 September 2015