Team:SYSU-Software/Practices
Human Practices: An Overview
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During the project, we considered what potential impacts our project will have on scientific problems (like, scientific communication and collaboration, transparency and reproducibility, safety, security, etc.) and societal questions (like, intellectual property rights, ethics, regulation, etc.) Through various kinds of practices (like, survey, consulting professors, attending lectures, discussions, etc), we gained more insights into our project, and were aware of these potential impacts when planning the project.
With the potential impacts on scientific problems and societal questions in mind, when designing the project we integrated many fine details into the software. We tried hard to make more positive contributions to scientific and societal practices, and reduce and even eliminate the potential negative impacts. When the project was (nearly) complete we did project assessment and public testing, and got many feedbacks from the experts and the public, which helped us improve the project.
Project assessment is an important way to examine our project in the context of scientific practices and societal environment. We did some tests to see whether our project will make harmful or dangerous genetic circuits using biological parts of Risk Group 3 or higher. We consulted our instructors and also had our project tested by other iGEM teams, and through their feedbacks we can examine how feasible our project is, and how user-friendly the software to its potential users.
It is fun and exciting to engage the public in synthetic biology, to share with them the ideas of iGEM, and to tell them what we want to do in our project. We held a garden party and some mini lectures to the public. We designed an interesting game, Synbio Box, and also poker cards on biosafety, to promote Synbio to the public. In the garden party, a bi-directional talk between the public and our team on our ideas is especially exciting; they gave us many excitingly new and helpful inspirations!