Project Transparency
Learn about how to increase your project's clarity here!
- Read about some general Wiki Tips, including the new changes for the 2015 season
- Learn about the importance of making sure that your Project Overview is clear and concise
- Get information on making sure your Project Results are clearly defined on your wiki and in your presentation
- Think about making a succinct Project Summary to highlight your efforts
Introduction
Every year, we have excited team members reach out to the staff at iGEM Headquarters asking us questions about how their project will be judged and if certain items will qualify them for medals. We have created this page as a part of our effort to be more transparent about the judging process and to give teams some ideas on how to improve the clarity of their projects.
The goal of this information is to help teams understand the importance of scientific communication in terms of explaining their work to a larger audience and documentation as it pertains to the iGEM competition for medals and special prizes for the 2015 season.
General Wiki Tips
Everyone involved with your iGEM team should make sure to read through the iGEM Wiki Requirements and the new material on Standard Wiki Pages for the 2015 season. Making sure that you follow these requirements should not be the responsibility of only a few team members, but rather a shared responsibility throughout the team, including the advisors and mentors.
Remember, your team wiki is a public page and should show of all of your hard work! Everyone on the team should take pride in the wiki and we recommend that everyone on your team help contribute some material for it.
Please take note of the Perspectives from an iGEM veteran that Ana from iGEM HQ wrote as a former team member on an iGEM team. Ana's suggestions are focused on the team members building and maintaining the wiki, and we recommend all teams follow her advice!
Another member of the iGEM HQ team, Traci, had a few suggestions to add. Traci was the team mentor and instructor for the 2011-2014 Boston University teams, so her perspective is from running an iGEM team.
1. Assign weekly tasks for the wiki during lab meetings
As we all know, team mentors and advisors are invested in their team's project. Remember, a large part of an iGEM project is the team wiki! As a team instructor, I helped students decide on weekly tasks and assignments for the content for their wiki during our regular lab meetings. I often told students to work on the content while they waited for reactions to finish or gels to run in the lab, which seemed to work nicely.
2. Instructors and mentors should be proofreaders for the wiki
As your team creates content and posts it on their wikis, you should make sure to take some time each week to read through the wiki and ensure the content has been proofread for typos, clarity, and accuracy.
3. Assign specific pages to specific people
Ideally, each team member will be creating content for the team wiki with a smaller group responsible for editing the wiki and posting the content to the page. To avoid confusion and possible deletion of content, you should make sure the editing of each page is specifically assigned to one person.
4. Updates done on the Wiki Freeze Day should be minor edits
Every team around the world will be editing and updating their wikis on September 18th. I strongly urge you to only make minor edits and update figures on Wiki Freeze Day. I recommend that the vast majority of your content should be on the wiki a full week before the Wiki Freeze so you have plenty of time to read through everything and make sure you haven't missed any critical item. This will greatly reduce the stress on your team members!
Project Overview
Having a brief, well written project overview is a huge help for anyone interested in reading about your project. The overview should only be a few paragraphs in length and often teams will include a cartoon or diagram to accompany their overview. Ideally, the overview should be understood by scientists and non-scientists alike. We also recommend that you have pages with detailed descriptions for each part of your project, complete with references and links to your results.
Recommended Components for a Clear Overview Page
Examples of Well Written Overview Pages
Overview illustration from the 2013 SYSU-China team
Below are a handful of well done project overviews. These examples show different ways that the project overview can be done on the team wikis. These are all concise, well-written project overviews with links to more detail.
Project Design
Project Results
Make sure you post your results clearly on you wiki! It may sound like an obvious statement, but sometimes teams can forget to clearly state how their experiments ended and discuss what they concluded from that work. It's not enough to post your experimental details in your online wiki notebook - you need to have a section devoted to the results of your work on your wiki.
We strongly recommend that the results of your work should be posted on your wiki using your assigned standard Results page (https://2015.igem.org/Team:Example/Results). You will want to include a link to this page in your wiki navigation so it's easy to find to someone who will be seeing your wiki for the first time. Finding the team's results can sometimes be challenging when there isn't an obvious button or dropdown menu item on your wiki that is labeled "Results". You want your judges to find the results of your hard work, so make sure it's easy to find the page!
Recommended Components for a Clear Results Page
Examples of Well Written Results Pages
Results example from the 2013 Paris Bettencourt team
Take a look at the example Results pages below. These examples represent just a handful of teams who implemented a clear, concise Results page. It can be a difficult task and will take careful planning and hard work to execute it well. These teams all have some variation of the components given above in their pages.