Project description
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iGEM TIES (Team IntEraction Study) explores how iGEM team interactions, diversity and transdisciplinarity impact the global performance of iGEM teams and the learning experience of the students.

iGEM TIES (Team IntEraction Study) explores how iGEM team interactions, diversity and transdisciplinarity impact the global performance of iGEM teams and the learning experience of the students.
Join the study and take part in the first large scale description of iGEM team work! Don't hesitate to shoot us an email at igem-ties@cri-paris.org if you have any question.
All the collected data is anonymised, kept secured on a server, and participation to each data collection is completely voluntary.
Participating teams will get a report of their team interactions (interaction networks, number of interactions etc) after the Wiki Freeze.
You can visit this page to see visualizations of data collected during iGEM 2020.
To join the study, download the latest version of CoSo
The iGEM TIES project (Team IntEractions Study) is a research study conducted at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) in Paris. In this project, we study how team interactions and team diversity impact the performance of iGEM teams and the learning experience of the students. How do students collaborate? How are subgroups formed? What is the frequency of interactions with mentors/PIs? How do these interactions lead to better learning (skill spreading), productivity (BioBricks produced / project size), creativity (project uniqueness) or just success in the competition (medals, prizes, winners)?
To answer these questions, we are partnering with iGEM teams to conduct a quantitative, large-scale study, using several methods:
We prepared questionnaires to be filled by team members at the 3 time points during the project. They allow us to better understand the team process and diversity!
The analysis of the metadata (user-timestamp) from communication networks (Slack, WhatsApp, E-mail, etc.) at the end of the project allows to better understand the communication flows within the team.
Lastly, we built a smartphone application that allows to measure interactions of team members in the lab using bluetooth signals. By using the application on certain days during the study, we can reconstruct team interaction networks in the lab!
All this data is anonymised, kept secured on a server, and participation to each data collection is completely voluntary. After the wiki freeze we provide a report summarizing some general analytics of the team (networks of interaction, number of interactions etc).
You can find more information about the study in the information form and in some background slides. If you have any questions, contact us by email at igem-ties@cri-paris.org! Also, if you know of other teams that would be interested, spread the word!
Marc Santolini is the team leader of the iGEM TIES project. Passionate about science of science, he is a long-term research fellow at CRI Paris, primarily working on network science. He is also the cofounder of Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) and part of the iGEM Insights Steering committee.
Savandara Besse aka. Savvy is behind the social media of iGEM-Ties. iGEMer since 2015, she fell in love with the iGEM TIES project and is actively promoting CoSo App to the 2020 iGEM teams. Besides, she is a bioinformatics PhD student at the Université of Montréal.
DM me on iGEM Slack to talk about CoSo app!
Robert Ward met Marc and Raphaël during the iGEM Giant Jamboree of 2019. Their common interests of understanding universal properties of scientific and engineering teams leads him to join iGEM TIES. He is working on the task board organization and is building different surveys for the study.