Overview

In this section, we highlight the efforts to build a web platform for teams to communicate with each other. All five teams discuss together and become better together

Motivation

We have formed an active discussion group with teams such as NZAU-China, NJMU-China, NWU-China, and WHU-China. All the teams' projects are related to the human intestine, and the teams share their experiences and cooperate to overcome problems and gained a lot.

After a long time of discussion in the message group, some teams reflected that the efficiency of communication was not high. And the content once discussed could not be saved for a long time and would be overwritten by later messages. The problems discussed by the two teams would likely be encountered by other teams afterward. But because the record of the discussion was covered by the later messages, it was inconvenient to find. We had a discussion meeting to discuss this issue.

Difficulties and Efforts

The Piazza platform inspired us to improve it, and we wanted to build a webpage where all teams could post their questions to the platform, and also see and answer other teams' questions. This way all teams' questions can be kept on the webpage for a long time, clear and comprehensive.

We searched the web for a suitable solution and found that the open-source community pybbs was perfect for our needs. So we rented a server and deployed that open-source community to the server. During this process, we configured the server incorrectly and reinstalled it several times as we were not very familiar with the MySQL database and Nginx services. However, after we learned the relevant knowledge, we finally realized the platform after continuous efforts.

Platform Introduction

The platform is called iGEM intestinal information discussion platform, based on the JDK environment, which can realize the common functions of network bbs such as login, posting, and replying, providing a platform for our team conducting intestinal-related research to communicate and exchange with each other.

As shown in the figure, the left side is the post-browsing area, where multiple teams have exchanged their research questions. On the right side is the point ranking of each user, with higher points corresponding to higher activity. If there is a topic of interest, the team members can simply click in to browse and leave their thoughts in the comments as they do with social media.

If in doubt, you can also create a new post by clicking the Post button in the upper right corner after logging in. Simply enter the title and content as if you were sending an email, and you can create a platform to communicate with other talented team members. Users can also insert pictures of interest in their posts, typeset questions, etc. Both of these actions can earn points and get higher rankings. And posts with positive discussions and high topic value can apply to become top posts to increase the chance of being viewed.

What our team and other teams have gained

Through this platform, we received help from other teams in terms of experiments, hardware, and human practices. With joint efforts, we solved one problem after another and made progress in the project.

At the same time, we also actively provided help to other teams, and we were happy to help other teams' projects to solve problems.

By building this communication platform, we not only created an exclusive website for exchanging information among various iGEM teams but also learned about programming, servers, etc. ......

Our interaction with other teams

In addition to communication on this platform, we communicate with the best teams through other channels. We participated in the June meetup hosted by iBowu-China, the July meetup hosted by HBUT-China, and the September meetup hosted by iBowu-China. We have meetings with teams such as iBowu-China, HBUT-China, LZU-China, XJTLU-China, UM-Macau, WS-HZBIOX, etc. details in the collaboration section