Partnership

Partnership Project Overview

During the first collaboration meet-up with team Thailand_RIS, we shared the difficulties encountered during our projects. After discussion, both teams realized the severe language barrier we had with our local communities. Language acts as an important medium in expressing our ideas to the general public; thus, translation plays a crucial role in raising awareness of synthetic biology’s potential to solve current world problems. Addressing both team’s concerns, our team partnered up with Thailnd_RIS, Korea_HS, and UiOslo_Norway and decided to compile a collection of educational infographics from other iGEM teams to be presented on social media and our wiki. . The page on our wiki acts as an online exhibition for everyone to walk through and learn about the topics of participating teams. Participating teams can send us their infographic to be translated into Korean (Korea_HS), Thai (Thailand_RIS), Norwegian (UiOslo_Norway), and Mandarin (GEMS_Taiwan). After the translation, the infographics will be posted on each of the translation team’s Instagram stories, Instagram post, and wiki exhibition page. By doing so, the non-english speaking communities in which the translation teams are from will be able to understand the different problems iGEM teams are currently trying to solve.

You can find the online exhibition on our Infographic Exhibition page.

Teaming up - Forming a Core Translation Group

During the initial phase of the project, we discussed with team Thailand_RIS about different aspects of the infographic project and began recruiting the core translation team. We sent out direct messages to various iGEM teams located in different regions; eventually, we recruited UiOslo_Norway and Korea_HS as a part of our core translation team. During the coming months, all of the teams kept connected via a group chat in order to discuss project details and update translation progress.

Contents of the Infographic

To maximize efficiency in translating the infographics we received, our team decided to make general guidelines for participating teams to follow. The guidelines are as follows:

• The infographic should contain basic information about the project - in a way that the general public would understand. As the target audience of the infographics will be non-speaking members of the general public, we hope to keep the infographic as simple as possible.

• The infographic should also include 85% of basic content about the current world problem your team is trying to tackle. Only 15% should contain information about your engineered solution.

To make the participating teams more clear about what we were asking, we created our own infographic as an example for everyone to reference.

Collecting Infographics

After all the project details were established, we started to spread and announce the news of this collaboration project. First, we created Instagram posts and stories to spread the word. Realizing this might not be the most effective way to advertise, we started to message iGEM teams and asked for their willingness to participate in this project to gain chances for outreach. After the teams accepted our request, we hosted a google meet meeting to discuss the details of the project. Lastly, during the Taiwan synbio alliance meetup, we mentioned our infographic project during discussions with various Taiwanese teams.

Distribution

We decided to spread the translated infographic through each team’s Instagram account in its respective language. Our team will post translated infographics on our Instagram page to notify the availability of an infographic in multiple languages.

At the end of our infographic exchange, we received infographics from 8 different teams Mingdao, Düsseldorf, CCU_Taiwan, NYCU_Formosa, and KCIS_Xiugang_Taipei, Thailand_RIS, UiOslo_Norway, GEMS_Taiwan. After receiving all the infographics, the core team was able to translate most infographics into five distinct languages. For distribution, after discussion with team Thailand_RIS, our team edited the infographics to Instagram post size and, for each team, posted the version of the team’s mother language and English; Each team posting will allow the different languages to reach their own communities, further spreading information. Elaborating on that, in the caption for the posts, we tagged hashtags using our own mother language, utilizing the algorithm of Instagram to spread the post to people who speak the respective languages.

Conclusion

Throughout this whole partnership project, the core teams worked closely with each other via group chats and online meetings, getting to know a wider range of topics from multiple iGEM teams. Every team assisted the public in understanding the basics of synthetic biology, achieving the ultimate goal of spreading the influence of iGEM to local communities.

You can find the online exhibition on our Infographic Exhibition page.