EcoliWiki Workshop at Phage 2007

Pre-meeting publicity

Blurb: Online at [1]

Community annotation for E. coli with EcoliWiki

• Do you know things about E. coli that aren't captured by the existing web resources?

• Do you need a place for your students and postdocs to learn what you know about E. coli?

• Are you looking for more information about E. coli, its phage, plasmids, mobile genetic elements, methods, resources and literature?

If you answered yes to any of these, EcoliWiki wants you.

EcoliWiki is a part of PortEco, the comprehensive model organism resource for E. coli K-12. The goal of EcoliWiki is to gather and share information about E. coli biology from the real experts. That means you, the people who attend the Phage Meeting. The EcoliWiki team invites you to join us for a wiki training workshop at the 2007 Molecular Genetics of Bacteria and Phage Meeting from August 7-12 in Madison. Within an hour, you'll be able to access, edit, and contribute your knowledge of E. coli to EcoliWiki. We will have a wiki workshop and will offer one-on-one training during the poster sessions. Bring your laptop!

Wisconsin Pre Workshop

Bob Landick helped arrange a pre-meeting workshop for people at UW-Madison. It was held on Monday August 6, 2007 in the Biochemistry Department. Title: EcoliWiki: Who needs artificial intelligence when you can harness the real thing?

Grad students at this workshop were recruited to serve as helpers during the conference. They helped spread the word and sign up users.

Workshop

Preparations

Practiced prior to the meeting Got promotional materials (JH paid for these, no federal funds used).

Setup

Arranged with UW Union Meetings Staff (Lindsey Marsch). We had the Langdon Room for three afternoons. The workshop was on Thursday, between lunch and the poster session. A handout was inserted into registration packets and a slide was shown during breaks. On Wednesday and Friday the room was arranged with tables and chairs as if it was an Internet cafe. Lindsey provided extra temporary UW wireless access accounts. UW provided a projector; we brought a backup.

Presentation overview

• Jim intro and account creation
• Adrienne tour of gene centric pages
  • Add an allele and a reference
• Debby showed product, expression, evolution pages and transcription units.
• Gwen showed do new page creation using plasmids as an example
  • using the templated page creation system.
  • uploading, resizing, and captioning an image (plasmid map)

Presentation run as live demo using the Mac mini to drive the projector.

EcoliWiki

Purpose: Community annotation-what does that mean? What are examples of community annotation?

Mechanism: Ecoliwiki is the mechanism. Explain what EW is first, then introduce a wiki.

What is a wiki?

New pages can be created. Revision history is there Completely editable.

Set up Accounts

Break up into groups. (team must know how to set up accounts). Walk through and break into groups. To-do: move create account to side bar Team members set up and then someone who just set up their account can create the account. What if you forget your username?

Using the EcoliWiki

Searching

Searching will lead into the different types of pages

Types of pages

Explain the types of pages first, then go into editiing Gene Oriented, Complexes, Databases, Literature Also, text entry and formatting and discussion pages

Help

We can talk about the help page links, then do a Help Page Summary

Writing

Table Usage

In the guided tour, entering and formatting text should be natural. We should show how to table edit first and then to bring in the notes section, say something like there really isn't enough room in the table.

Go back and add a row to the table. The table can be a lead into the references Make a link using the table tour.

Page Creation

Page generation for things we don't cover Page generation for templates

Things to cover if we have time

There is a GO table Putting pages in categories Using the discussion pages Edit conflict, i.e. how to deal with two people modifying same page at same time

Network Back-up Plan

We obtained a Mac mini prior to the meeting and set it up to serve a backup copy of the wiki over its built-in wifi, in case internet connection to Texas failed during the meeting (this didn't happen). The mini served as the controller for the projector during the workshop.

T-shirts and post-its

EcoliWiki t-shirts

We prepared T-shirts and Post-it notes with the EcoliWiki logo to give away during the workshops and the meeting.

One-on-one training

Gwen training Fred Neidhardt

Debby training Malcolm Winkler

We had quite a few people get one-on-one training during the open times. We also had our laptops to give accounts and training during breaks and after sessions.