Calling all Curators

[Mike Cherry]

This is to all scientific curators at all model organism databases  
(MOD). I would like to begin a monthly teleconference, which could  
also include a video conference later this year. There are several  
forms of interaction between individual curators and between MODs  
already however a regular frequent forum is needed to continue making  
progress.  In particular, we need to continually work to reduce  
variability between the annotations created by different MODs, and by  
different curators.   This is NOT for just the GOC and those that  
normally are involved in GOC conferences.  This is for all MOD  
curators.  The MODs are become closer in their procedures as a result  
of the discussions occurring as part of the GOC.  However, there is a  
lot more than can be done to unify all curators at all the MODs.  Thus  
this call will not be a GOC call on picking the best GO term -- that  
may happen a little but the intent is to include broader curation  
activities.

While this meeting will be started by the Gene Ontology Consortium I  
want this to grow to all scientific curators that create manual  
annotations.  This conference call is not about making software that  
does annotation, but would include discussions of software to assist  
curators.  This is not a conference discussion of software practices,  
there are enough venues for these discussions.

The video part will be a future addition as I feel that these meetings  
will be more productive if we can see each other, we are discussing  
the human activity of curation and a discussion works better face to  
face.   I am very interested in having a video component as I believe  
this will help the meetings provide an even better connection.  We  
will be able to use WebEx to share slides and web screens.  This  
monthly conference will start as a conference call and with time we  
can work out the technical details for the video and/or Skype. As  
you'll see below we could have greater than 50 people on these calls.

The biggest issue is scheduling. I would like to propose that two  
regular times are schedule switch monthly between the two times.  Its  
obvious that it is difficult to get California and the UK on a call at  
the same time during normal business hours.  Requiring folks, at least  
initially, to call in from home is a big negative.  Thus I have  
created a doodle pool.  Please ignore the dates, rather use this as  
just days of the week.  All times in the poll should be stated as  
Eastern time.  The result of this pool is to identify two different  
times that would work for the most people.  This assumes that most  
will only connect once every two months.

   http://www.doodle.ch/eambfifz3ip5v2sv

While a core number of the participants will be from the GOC. I want  
the group include a diverse number of curators. Other topics like  
sequence annotation both DNA and protein, phenotype annotation, and of  
course general topics appropriate for any curation group for example  
how do you prioritize the literature and how do we work with journals  
in a more productive manner.

The intension is for ALL MOD curators to be involved, not just the one  
or two people that currently represent a group at the GOC.  I feel it  
will be a failure if this is just for the usual crowd. If this can get  
a diverse group interacting then perhaps we will need to have  
additional regular calls. The goal is to foster interactions between  
the community of curators that exist around the world. GO already has  
mechanisms for communication that work, but could always be better.  
There are many others that are not connected either because they don't  
belong to the GO club (some people feel this way) or they personally  
don't connect with GO because their project already has others  
participating in the GOC.  We already have a start on a broader  
group.  The Annotation email list has 106 addresses, something about  
45 are addresses of people that have attended a GOC meeting.  That  
leaves 61 addresses that are either not connected to GOC or are other  
curators at GOC projects but have not attended one of the Consortium  
meetings.

After each teleconf there will be a brief summary sent out (not sure  
which lists to include yet) and that email may get even more people  
interacting and interested in the next call.

Because scientific curators are professional staff members we need to  
raise the requirement for interactions with the goal of being more  
efficient, have less variability between the annotations, and to have  
more understanding of what others do.  Interacting with other groups  
to promote an exchange of information will result in more effective  
operations and more standardized results. This goes beyond GOC and the  
MODs as the curation profession needs to work together and decrease  
the amount of isolation that I believe exists. I certainly do not  
believe that this is done on purpose but rather the interaction has  
not been made simpler.  For sure there are lots of interactions  
already, but I believe there could be many more. The GOC is a great  
example of how things change when people talk to each other.  The hope  
is that curators from projects funded by NIH, NSF, USDA, DOE, BBSRC,  
EBI,  ... and industry will come together at least every two months.   
Curators already, by definition, have a lot of interaction with the  
communities they server. We need to add a reward system where they are  
also judged by the amount of interaction with other curators. Some  
already do a lot of this, many don't do as much as they should -- we  
can help this happen.  I'm thinking of contacting the PIs of the MODs  
and strongly encourage their staff to participate.

Please fill out the doodle poll (URL above).  I propose that the annotation at geneontology.org 
  list can be used for this new interaction.  That list already has  
many curators subscribed plus it is not a very heavily used list at  
the moment.  After a week or two I'll get back to you with the time of  
our first conference.

-Mike

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