FlyBase:Community Advisory Group

What is the FlyBase Community Advisory Group?

The FlyBase Community Advisory Group consists of researchers from the fly community and 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. We therefore setting up the FlyBase Community Advisory Group, with the aim of having a representative from every lab that uses Drosophila data in their research.

Members of the group are sent up to 6 surveys a year on a variety of different subjects. See the ‘Survey’ section below for details of subjects that have been covered so far.

Current membership

As of 10/11/2014 the group the FlyBase Community Advisory Group comprises 561 fly researchers from 41 different countries. FlyBase attracts users from a variety of different backgrounds, and FCAG members range from frequent FlyBase users to those who use FlyBase only occasionally or who work primarily with another organism. The group consists of a mixture of lab heads, postdoctoral researchers, students and technicians as well as many other roles associated with fly research.

Joining the group

If your lab has not yet signed up and you are interested in representing your group click on the link below to fill in the registration form.

http://flybase.org/static_pages/feedback/community_advisory_group_form.html

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
October 2014	How you use FlyBase and how it could be improved, usefulness of the automated gene summaries on the gene report