Re: [DIYbio] Re: Book or Blog?

Hi Sebastian, Hi everyone, 

what about a wiki? 

I asked myself the same question back in April and decided to put everything I learn about SynBio on my now open and non-profit wiki at www.synbio.info. 

The reasons for this were quite simple: 

• In a blog, everything is structured according to the day you write the blog post. How should one find what he or she is looking for? In a wiki, you have to think about a way how to structure your knowledge so you can easily retrieve it. 
• I am rather new to the field and don't have a biology background, and of course - you can never know everything. Meanwhile we are 33 users, out of which 5-10 are pretty active contributing their own field's of experience. They just start writing and then we talk together on Slack or within the wiki on how to improve the articles. Once we are happy, we share it to our 10.000+ Facebook fans at https://www.facebook.com/synbioinfo
• In a book, you spend years of researching things and then you publish - but our field is advancing way too fast and stuff you write today and publish say in 2 years is often outdated already. Also as a ready, you don't have the chance to dig deeper into a topic when you are interested. In the wiki, we try to put as many links to a topic as relevant and people keep adding they find to the wiki page when they dig deeper. 
• However, a great book I currently read is BioBuilder. I like this as a book, because it gives me all information from A-Z. But well, I read it and then I put it on the book shelf. On the wiki, I am working daily and use it as a "outsourced" brain memory, so when I forget a detail I find it with the search within seconds and that's much faster then skipping through the index of a book and rereading whole passages.  

So a wiki was for me the best choice. Also, I have been setting up knowledge management systems for pretty much all the companies I worked in so choosing Confluence from Atlassian was clear for me as well. The cool thing about this proprietary software is that it's from a pretty cool company and they offer free licenses for the software if you are a non-profit. Since I am a big fan of open knowledge, that just made sense as well. 

But how do we make money? 

Well, we found a very interesting business model for the non-profit: We are mostly software developers and we have to adapt the standard Confluence quite a bit to make this wiki happen the way we want it. So far, we have developed 45+ macros, little pieces of software that e.g. build a glossary for biological terms or manage the content creation process. We will soon start selling those on the Confluence Marketplace, and by this we can finance the servers, do some marketing and maybe even pay authors one day (however, not sure if that's the point of an open wiki.. what do you guys think? I am still uncertain about that point).

If you are interested, I would be happy to show you around the Wiki and we can see if we do something together! Basically, we could either set up a "menu point" on synbio.info for plant biology or even start an own wiki, as we recently did for bio art at http://art.synbio.info. What do you think? 

Talk to you soon and best regards from way too cold Munich, 

Jérôme

Am Samstag, 28. November 2015 19:21:57 UTC+1 schrieb Sebastian:

Hi Everyone,

I've been bouncing around the idea of compiling the 7+ years of plant tissue culture experience I've mustered into articles for my blog for a long time now. I have a ton of content as drafts and galleries of original pictures and whatnot and am stuck at a crossroads and would like some advice. My plan was to keep posting small articles to my blog about the little steps needed to make a transgenic plant in very newbie-friendly detail. A lot of my contacts recommended I just compile a book and publish it so that I can get a little compensation for the information that would be a little hard to come by in that specific format. I have always put teaching people first and tend to forget about supporting myself which is what led me to this intersection. 

Would people rather have a nice free blog that steadily outputs content with some tasteful adds pertaining to relevant companies and products, or pay a small price for a Julia Child-style cookbook of plant tissue culture and transformation recipes concocted by yours truly with plenty of pictures and commentary?

 What would be a good price point?

 Is it worth the delay to have a physical edition one can tote to their bench or is it more useful to have an organized blog website thingy that people can reference digitally?

What would be a good starting project? I was thinking a GUS assay since it covers a bunch of various topics and the plasmid is commercially available and off-patent. I'm not a fan of GFP since the stable ones require harmful UV and I have yet to transform the couple fluorescent plasmids I've optimized into tobacco to verify that long wave UV will work with decent effect. Another option would be anthocyanin knockouts/add-ins or variegation gene introduction but would require further testing. GUS requires a bit more chemicals but the result is a strong insoluble blue precipitate against a white background of ethanol-bleached plants. No fancy equipment necessary! I'm also not stepping foot anywhere near glowing plants for many reasons so please don't ask to make a book about making a glowing plant from scratch. That being said, if you had a plant biotech cookbook, what would be your desired "Hello World" project? Herbicide tolerance alone is boring, non-visual, and controversial/unethical in spread so that's out of the question. It's kinda funny that the perfect intro project would require a lot of research on my part into verifying chromoprotein stability in lower pH (plant cytosol is ~5.6 - 5.8) and shipping things to the vacuole, etc, etc. so any feedback on what you all want to have as the main project of the book (if you even want a book in the first place) would be awesome!

I thought I would ask the community that would be most interested in learning more about the dark-green arts (you gals and guys) if it would even be worth the trouble. I've noticed an overwhelming lack of good plant biotech material out there and there are too many comments about plant culturing being "hard to do" and "unpredictable" which I think is just silly. Anyone can do science and everyone can do plant biotech. The hardest part seems to be aseptic technique and culture-to-culture media decisions but those are the most straight forward. I am a very visual learner so I would include a ton of pictures with various angles and explanations so anyone ages ~8 and up (maybe even earlier if fine motor skills are honed!) can make their own plants. Either way let me know what y'all think about the idea of Book vs Blog for introductory plant tissue culture. I would still maintain my blog for the day to day content and more advanced topics but for the newbie I think a desk reference at a fair price would be ideal. Thanks!

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