<p>Does anybody work in a lab that uses a lab message board?</p>
<p>I work in a moderately large (18 member) microbiology/virology lab and have proposed to my PI and various members of my lab group the idea of starting a lab message board. Would you mind sharing some honest information about how the message board was used?
*Did you find your lab's message board a useful forum of communication? Did you find it redundant or a useful resource? Did people collaborate on projects and talk about relevant, hot topics in your field via the message board?
*How much would you rate its actual use by fellow lab members?
*Also, would you mind sharing the basics of how the message board was organized and what sort of topics were discussed?</p>
<p>It is my hope that the board would be used to:
* Collect commonly used lab protocols and best practices
* Share useful external resources
* Document safety and equipment issues
* Encourage ongoing dialogue across projects
* Archive important conversations pertaining to the lab
* Foster a greater sense of inclusion and provide an additional resource for new entrants to the lab
* Record and summarize lab meeting presentations
* Recollect lab history
* Explore issues in the field</p>
<p>Access to the board will be restricted to lab members via the PI's homepage. An administrator can maintain top posts that list and summarize the content of each forum. E-mail is still important, but the message board will add a useful layer of communication with which to archive lab activity and discuss research issues.</p>
<p>I talked with the PI and he's ok with it but I haven't really received any response so far from lab members. Someone even told me that no one would use it and that it would be redundant... I would personally learn a lot from participation in such a forum since lab meetings can be above my head at times. While oral communication is wonderful when it's informative and respectful (which often is not the case towards me for sociological reasons), I think issues can be explored in a deeper manner in text, which would be a springboard for deeper, oral communication from a shared well of knowledge. People mostly keep to themselves and rarely actively collaborate between projects and from what I can surmise from some lab meetings, sometimes people make huge errors that could be corrected mid-way if there was a little more collective oversight.</p>
<p>So my question is: Does anybody else have experience with lab message boards and are they used/useful or redundant and seldom used? Is it a worthy or pointless endeavor?</p>
<p>I really do appreciate your taking time out of your day to share this information. I would really find it useful if there was a precedent we could follow.</p>
<p>My lab is trying to start a wiki, which I think could be more advantageous than a message board, organizationally speaking. </p>
<p>We’re still in the planning stages, but our goals are quite similar to yours – to have a master repository of knowledge that will prevent unnecessary reinvention of the wheel.</p>
<p>Oh wonderful! A lab in Harvard is actually organizing a lab wiki! Genius idea. May I ask what is your general area of study Mollie?</p>
<p>We’re a developmental neurobiology lab. We envision the wiki as a place to post and revise protocols, to note which antibodies and other reagents work well, and to keep track of reagents and mouse lines within the lab. There are about 20 of us, so it’s easy to lose track of who’s used which antibody and when. We anticipate the wiki saving us a decent amount of time and money.</p>
<p>We haven’t started yet – this is the brainchild of one of our technicians, and our PI has just given her the go-ahead to start designing it.</p>
<p>I’d find a message board more helpful than a wiki, frankly, since I feel wikis can be very difficult to navigate when you don’t have extremely large sets of information. If you’ve only got a handful of topics that will be continuously updated, a message board would probably be preferable since you could have an easily viewable running update of what’s been going on and changes which have been made.</p>
<p>Not to dissuade you, but I tried this at my last lab and it was an utter failure. Everybody was resistant to doing something new, even if it simplified problems with file transfer, communication, ordering and sharing protocols. I don’t know the right way to overcome that institutional inertia. You would think being scientists that we might all be open to adopting new technology but our profession has its far share of luddites. I had to demonstrate what a search engine was to my current boss (in 2007).</p>
<p>I haven’t tried this website out for myself yet but it looks like it might be right up your alley…
[Make</a> Science Easier | Labmeeting](<a href=“http://www.labmeeting.com/]Make”>http://www.labmeeting.com/)</p>
<p>I know you said you were going to portal through your PI’s website but perhaps this website will offer greater functionality and encourage more people to use it. </p>
<p>mollie> I don’t know how the wiki page is being written but my lab had a database for similar information and a couple things we thought about when launching was
-having local access to the file (our computers are networked, but if the internet goes down, the network does too. If this happens, you can just go to the workstation to pull up the file.)
-organizing the information for our needs. Since we did the coding, we could easily link up different entries like pulling up a plasmid, seeing if there was a glycerol stock of it, and what box in the -80 contains it. It also linked up to primers used to clone it as well as a map.</p>