Stockholm

Our first contacts with other teams started together with 2014 Aalto-Helsinki team, as university students from Stockholm building a new iGEM team from scratch contacted Aalto-Helsinki. In one of the very first meetings of the Aalto-Helsinki 2015 team we had a Skype session together with Aalto-Helsinki 2014 and the new Stockholm team. We first exchanged ideas with Stockholm and Aalto-Helsinki 2014 gave them advice in starting a completely new team. We kept close contacts with the Stockholm iGEM team throughout the summer, often having Skype sessions for updates on both teams' progress and for sharing experiences and ideas.

We were eager to meet the Stockholm team already before the Giant Jamboree, and were strongly supportive of expanding the planned Swedish iGEM meetup to a Nordic iGEM Conference, which was indeed realized in Uppsala in the end of July. On our way to the conference, we visited the Stockholm iGEM team lab at the AlbaNova University Center and met with the team. Our wonderful guide Sarah from the Stockholm team also kindly gave us a tour around the Royal Institute of Technology and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

Both of our teams recognized a need for better collaboration tools for iGEM teams. This led us to working on a collaboration platform, the HumHub, which team Stockholm put up. Together with them, we wrote a report on this platform, how we used it, what it could be and what we felt were its pros and cons. The whole report can be read on our HumHub report page.

Nordic iGEM Conference

The Nordic iGEM Conference (NiC) was held in Uppsala 24-26.7 Hosted by Uppsala and Stockholm iGEM teams, it was a really superb event, strengthening the Nordic iGEM community. It was really cool to meet and get to know seven other iGEM teams from across the Nordic region and hear about their projects. Besides the hosting teams and us, participants included teams Linköping, Chalmers-Gothenburg, UI Oslo, Copenhagen and SDU Denmark.The NiC also gave us a great chance to practice for the Giant Jamboree, as we held a 12-minute presentation on our project, followed by questions from the audience and the jury, formed by members from each participating team. The Uppsala and Stockholm teams had also prepared interesting workshops for the event, as well as great evening events, including a dinner and a welcoming BBQ, where our team also got to organize a get-to-know-each-other activity for participants.