Forum:Other Examples Of Successful Bioinformatics-Focused "Professional" Networks?

Question

[aidan-budd]

I'm involved in a few "professional" bioinformatics networks ("organised/coordinated interactions between people involved in bioinformatics" could be one way of defining what I mean by this...), and I'm interested in trying to understand better what contributes to making them more/less successful. Hope would, of course, be to learn from the more successful ones how to make those I participate in more successful.

I'm new to BioStar, and am extremely impressed by it, particularly in terms of amount of activity, size (in terms of membership), motivation-inspiringness [or whatever to call it] (the reputation "score" and badges, for example), and utility. For me, it's a great example of a successful network of this kind.

Thus, my question for the BioStar community:

are there other "networks" of this kind that you're involved in that you find particularly successful?

If so, it'd be great to hear about them from you.

I know the question is very vague - this is intentional, I don't want to be restrictive concerning the kind of entities/organisations/forums that people might consider as being relevant.

Examples I can think of are:

• big EU FP6 grants, EMBRACE, ENFIN, and BioSapiens (which ended quite a few years ago now) - I guess they're being replaced by ELIXIR...?
• Heidelberg Unseminars in Bioinformatics (that I'm involved in myself)
• BioStar (obviously...!)
• EMBnet

[Pawel Szczesny]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but ELIXIR is a network of research infrastructures, isn't it? On the other hand, it simply might be too early. ELIXIR is a quite young initiative.

[aidan-budd]

Thanks, Pawel - yes, I did have ELIXIR in mind, as you say, it's still in the process of being born (no national nodes are selected yet, I think) so it's rather something to keep an eye on with interest, for me at least, in terms of learning from how it deals with its challenging remit.

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

obviously: Twitter

SeqAnswers: http://seqanswers.com/

The French mailing list for Bioinformatics (in French, but many posts are written in English): http://listes.sfbi.fr/wws/info/bioinfo

FriendFeed is almost dead(?), but it has been the place of many interactions between some of us. http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists

[Leandro Lima]

I think Twitter is really good to do it.

Here my "bioinfo" list members: https://twitter.com/lelimat/bioinfo/members

[aidan-budd]

Thanks for the links, Pierre.

Answer 2

[Ben]

I know a lot of academics detest it but the obvious answer is LinkedIn which has a number of comp bio / bioinformatics groups, like Computational biology or Bioinformatics geeks with about 10k members each (obviously with lots of overlap).

[aidan-budd]

Thanks for reminding me of that, Ben. I'm on LinkedIn but (not sure why - maybe I should think about that a bit...) tend not to use the groups there for these kinds of questions. Maybe it's to do with lack of a feeling of control over the interface or the data or something like that.