"
Our Vision
Synthetic biology in Finland. How to tell about science to a general crowd. Science for business, business for science, us in the middle. Brian.
All the difficulties in biotechnology startups.
Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Outreach
From 2014.igem.org
Outreach
We wanted to make synthetic biology known in Finland. Many activities. Fun.
Starting Up
We took part in Summer of Startups, a startup incubator by Aalto University. We met a lot of other small startups and people interested in them. We found out how to pitch synthetic biology to people that know nothing about it. It just needed a sympathetic mascot and explaining how a bioreactor is a work place for him.
The program included two different occasions where we pitched our startup idea. There was pitching night, where we competed in pitching with all the other teams. Then there was Demo Day, a massive event with hundreds of people where we presented ourselves and run a booth for the whole evening, getting people excited about us and synthetic biology. We presented ourselves to an audience of hundreds and many of them came by our booth later.
Our booth at Demo Day.
[More stuff, maybe explanation of all the difficulties as a SynBio startup]
Media
A Website for the General Public
At the very beginning of the project we wanted to create a website that we could link to our friends, new acquaintances and potential sponsors. It included basic info about us and general overview of the project. We started developing it rapidly and it actually got into a presentable shape fairly fast. We expected to attract sponsors with the page, but the most important function turned about to be for media to use as a basis for a story and for our Facebook fans to get a more in-depth introduction to us.
The first web page was great practice for making the wiki. We already started wiki-work in June by making an upload tool and a basic page outline. We revised the look again in August and started writing final content. We wanted to make sure it wasn't completely done in the last week before the wiki freeze.
We did everything on the wiki from scratch, there's no templates. Just HTML, CSS and JavaScript written by us. Bootstrap and JQuery were the only libraries used, to help make the layout of the page.
Both the websites are available on GitHub.
This is how the first plan of the "sponsor website" looked like. We developed it further during the project. It might be still available at http://www.aaltohelsinki.com/.
We also made iGEM Wiki Quickifier., a tool to upload content to a particular team wiki without using the cumbersome wiki interface. It allows you to write all the pages as proper HTML and add template tags while uploading, so that they don't come in the way of writing actual content. It's work in progress and changing it to upload to other wikis than ours is not implemented, but if you know a bit of Python, it's easily done.
All of the code and installation instructions are available at the project's GitHub page.
Social Media
Our own website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr. Links.
Events and Meetings
We had Skype meets with a bunch of other teams. We also met Tania, who had been in the Netherlands team and now lives in Finland.
Finding Partners
Finding the right people and teaching them what iGEM means.
The Extras
Flappy Coli
We also made a silly game called Flappy Coli, where you are guiding a genetically modified pink bacteria through an iGEM-maze. It grows it's flagellum when you get farther and if you are good enough, it might grow more flagella!
All of the code is available at the project's GitHub page.
Here you can see a screenshot from the game.
