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 1st April 2015 the FlyBase Community Advisory Group comprised 559 fly researchers from 42 different countries.
| Country | Number of members | Country | Number of members |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 212 | Chile | 3 |
| United Kingdom | 70 | Finland | 3 |
| Germany | 43 | Mexico | 3 |
| France | 28 | Netherlands | 3 |
| Canada | 20 | Portugal | 3 |
| China | 19 | Argentina | 2 |
| India | 18 | Belgium | 2 |
| Spain | 16 | New Zealand | 2 |
| Japan | 13 | Poland | 2 |
| Italy | 12 | Singapore | 2 |
| Brazil | 11 | Taiwan | 2 |
| Sweden | 10 | Thailand | 2 |
| Australia | 7 | Colombia | 1 |
| Hungary | 6 | Cyprus | 1 |
| Israel | 6 | Czech Republic | 1 |
| South Korea | 6 | Estonia | 1 |
| Denmark | 5 | Ireland | 1 |
| Greece | 5 | Malta | 1 |
| Russia | 5 | Norway | 1 |
| Switzerland | 5 | Ukraine | 1 |
| Austria | 4 | Uruguay | 1 |
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 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 | Number of responses | Results |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 2014 |
|
457 |
|
| January 2015 |
|
382 |