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 members from any lab worldwide that uses FlyBase as part of its research. The FCAG member 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 3rd October 2016 the FlyBase Community Advisory Group comprised 541 fly researchers from 41 different countries.

Country	Number of members	Country	Number of members
United States	204	Portugal	4
United Kingdom	71	Finland	3
Germany	39	Mexico	3
France	26	Netherlands	3
Canada	20	Chile	3
Spain	18	Argentina	2
China	17	Belgium	2
India	15	New Zealand	2
Japan	14	Nigeria	2
Italy	11	Thailand	2
Brazil	11	Singapore	2
Sweden	9	Taiwan	1
Australia	7	Poland	1
Hungary	6	Colombia	1
Israel	6	Cyprus	1
Switzerland	6	Czech Republic	1
South Korea	5	Estonia	1
Denmark	5	Ukraine	1
Greece	5	Malta	1
Russia	5	Norway	1
Austria	4

Joining the group

Every person who uses FlyBase in their research is welcome into our group. Our aim is to have at least a representative from every lab. If you are interested in joining FCAG please 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	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	454	File:FCAG introductory survey results.pdf
January 2015	New 'Gene Group' resource	383	File:FCAG GeneGroup survey results.pdf
May 2015	Complex mutants and transgenic constructs	274	File:FCAG construct survey full results.pdf
July 2015	Default tracks on GBrowse	198	File:GBrowse default tracks survey results.pdf
October 2015	Predicting the future of fly research	135	File:FCAG predicting the future.pdf
January 2016	Video tutorials	149	File:FCAGwikiVideoTutorialSurvey.pdf
July 2016	Protein domain graphics/info	208	File:FCAGwikiProteinDomainSurvey.pdf
September 2016	2016 General FlyBase survey	235	File:2016 General FlyBase survey.pdf
November 2016	Display of Gene Ontology Annotations	In progress	In progress