FlyBase:Community Advisory Group

What is the FlyBase Community Advisory Group?

The FlyBase Community Advisory Group (FCAG) was launched in September 2014 with the aim of gaining greater feedback from the community about changes in FlyBase.

You may not know that FlyBase is generated by a team of 30 people, working at Harvard, Indiana, New Mexico and Cambridge Universities. As the members of the FlyBase team work to improve the amount and usefulness of data in FlyBase, numerous questions arise regarding which data are the most important for Drosophila researchers and how we can most usefully present these data on the website. While we do our best to make changes that will be optimal for all Drosophila researchers, we wanted to be able to consult more widely so that we could be sure that our decisions would be helpful for the greatest number of people.

The group consists of representatives from any lab worldwide that uses FlyBase as part of its research. The representative can be the lab head, a postdoc, student, technician or anyone else who uses FlyBase and feels that they could contribute. FlyBase attracts users from a variety of different backgrounds and our members range from frequent FlyBase users to those who use FlyBase only occasionally or who work primarily with another organism.

Members of the group are sent up to 6 surveys a year on a variety of different subjects (see the Surveys section below for details of subjects that have been covered so far).

Current membership

As of 9th November 2015 the FlyBase Community Advisory Group comprised 558 fly researchers from 41 different countries.

Country	Number of members	Country	Number of members
United States	209	Chile	3
United Kingdom	68	Finland	3
Germany	43	Mexico	3
France	27	Netherlands	3
Canada	20	Portugal	3
China	19	Argentina	2
India	19	Belgium	2
Spain	17	New Zealand	2
Japan	13	Poland	2
Italy	12	Singapore	2
Brazil	11	Taiwan	2
Sweden	9	Thailand	2
Australia	7	Colombia	1
Hungary	6	Cyprus	1
Israel	6	Czech Republic	1
South Korea	6	Estonia	1
Switzerland	6	Ireland	1
Denmark	5	Malta	1
Greece	5	Norway	1
Russia	5	Ukraine	1
Austria	4

Joining the group

Our aim is to have a representative from every lab that uses FlyBase in their research. If your lab has not yet signed up and you are interested in representing your group go to the registration form

Updating your details (current members)

If you are an existing member of the group and you would like to update your details click here to go to our contact FlyBase form and choose the subject ‘FlyBase Community Advisory Group’, detailing the changes you would like to make.

Surveys

Date	Subject	Number of responses	Results
October 2014	How you use FlyBase and how it could be improved The automatically generated gene summaries on the gene report Receiving updates from FlyBase	457	File:FCAG introductory survey results.pdf
January 2015	New 'Gene Group' resource	382	File:FCAG GeneGroup survey results.pdf
May 2015	Complex mutants and transgenic constructs	274	File:FCAG construct survey full results.pdf FCAG construct survey results summary heatmap
July 2015	Default tracks on GBrowse	195	File:GBrowse default tracks survey results.pdf
October 2015	Predicting the future of fly research	Ongoing