WormBase Staff Resources

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This document describes collaborative tools available to WormBase team members.

Accounts

It's strongly encouraged that all team members of WormBase request a wormbase.org account.

Why wormbase.org accounts?

Perhaps you already have a caltech, oicr, google, or account on some other service. But a wormbase.org account is fundamentally different. It's not just an email account but access to a shared suite of tools.

Unifying resources like documents and calendars under wormbase.org facilitates collaboration. It increases project transparency. And it decreases administration overhead.

With a wormbase.org account, you will automatically be granted access to project calendars, documents, a contact list of team members, subscriptions to mailing lists. You can manage your own account information. Moreover, a *.wormbase.org account instantly grants additional privileges on the new WormBase website. As people matriculate onto the project they can quickly integrate with other team members and be brought up to speed with a shared corpus of documentation. They'll have immediate access to remote members via Google Chat or Voice, too.

This seamless integration is provided by Google Apps and includes the following services:

  • Gmail
  • Google Docs
  • Calendars
  • Discussion Groups
  • Google Chat
  • Shared Contacts

Cool. Integration is good and I want a wormbase.org account, but want to read email elsewhere.

No problem. Log on to your account once and set your email to forward to your secondary account. Done. Note that you will still need to send email to the discussion groups (see below) using the account to which you are subscribed.

What if you don't want a wormbase.org account?

Fine. You can still subscribe to things like the discussion groups using your old email. But you won't benefit from the seamless integration of these collaborative tools and you'll be less accessible to other members of the team.

Discussion Groups (Mailing Lists)

WormBase uses a number of mailing lists for discussion provided by Google Groups. You can manage subscriptions yourself, add posts, view threads, and search the archive all from the web.

Creating your own discussion group

With your wormbase.org account you can also create your own groups. This is a perfect way to support new side projects. Advantages of this approach over using ad-hoc distribution lists in your email client include the ability to let others easily use the discussion group, as well as the ability to create searchable archives of discussions available to the entire web or only subscribed members.

See the groups main page and the Mailing List Wiki page for details.

Calendar

*@wormbase.org account holders can add and edit events on the official WormBase calendars.

http://calendar.wormbase.org/

There are two calendars:

WormBase Details -- a calendar of project events, including conference calls, build deadlines, etc
WormBase Public Events -- a calendar listing public events like meetings

Documents

WormBase documents are available at:

http://docs.wormbase.org/

Any new documents created under your wormbase.org account can be easily shared with all other wormbase.org account holders. You'll need to add users outside of the wormbase.org domain specifically.

Email

*@wormbase.org account holders can access email at:

http://mail.wormbase.org/

If desired, email can be forwarded to a secondary account.

Contacts

To be written...

Issue Tracker

WormBase has a single unified issue tracker. Be sure to sign up as a follower of the project so that you can get updates on issues you report!

https://bitbucket.org/tharris/wormbase/issues?status=new&status=open

Reporting Guidelines

  1. Don't worry if something warrants reporting or not. If in doubt, report it!
  2. Be sure you are LOGGED IN. We may need additional information from you.
  3. Provide an informative title -- eg: Phenotypes on the Gene Page are lacking evidence display
    1. Optionally prepend one of the following [MINOR], [MODERATE], [URGENT], eg: [URGENT] wormbase.org is unreachable
  4. Assign issues related to web development to Todd for triage -- I encourage other centers to adopt a similar policy
  5. Include as much detail as necessary to explain the issue. More is always better. Example URLs are great, too.
  6. Be sure to tick the "follow this issue" checkbox to receive updates.
  7. If options are unclear, just ignore them!

Following through on issues

  1. Keep on top of issues you report.
  2. Add comments to issues to maintain a history directly in the system. Followers receive emails automatically.
  3. if there isn't progress, "bump" the issue or leave a comment!

Source Code

Source code is currently maintained in Mercurial (hg):

https://bitbucket.org/tharris/wormbase

Social Media

Blog

The official WormBase blog is called "M9":

http://blog.wormbase.org/

This is our primary vehicle for communication with users. You can subscribe to the blog via email at:

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=wormbase&loc=en_US

Twitter

Our Twitter account is:

http://twitter.com/wormbase

We have a secondary account for source code commits:

http://twitter.com/wormbase-commits