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GMOD Help Desk
The Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) Help Desk is available to provide support to GMOD users. The best place to start with any questions is probably the GMOD web site or one of the GMOD Mailing Lists.
Any question from general to specific can also be sent to the GMOD Help Desk. The help desk will either answer your question, find someone who can, or redirect it to the appropriate mailing list.
You can contact the Help Desk by writing to help@gmod.org.
Contents
Help Desk Services
The GMOD Help Desk is responsible for providing several services to the GMOD community.
User Help
The help desk responds to any e-mails sent to help@gmod.org. The help desk also monitors the GMOD Mailing Lists for recurring issues and addresses those in the GMOD documentation.
Grant Review Service
The help desk offers a grant review service for grants that propose using and/or extending GMOD components. Grant reviews focus on
- How GMOD Components can be used to their fullest extent in the grant, and
- Finding opportunities to fund support and extension of the GMOD project as a part of grants that use GMOD.
GMOD Web Site and Documentation
The help desk is responsible for maintaining the GMOD web site (this site), writing documentation on GMOD Components, and disseminating best practices. The help desk is also responsible for writing online tutorials for GMOD Components.
Education and Outreach
The help desk is also responsible for:
- Running multi-day hands-on GMOD Summer Schools for new GMOD users. In 2009, there will be two schools, one in North Carolina in July and one in Oxford UK in August.
- Giving in person tutorials and workshops at conferences and at GMOD user sites. Upcoming and recent workshops:
- Visualizing and Integrating Next Generation Sequence Data using GMOD
- Database Tools for Evolutionary Genomics
- Comparative Genomics with GBrowse_syn: A hands on workshop for visualizing your syntenic data with GBrowse_syn
- at the Plant and Animal Genome XVII Conference (PAG 2009) in January 2009.
- Chado - A Database Schema for Integrating Biological Data
- at the Arthropod Genomics Symposium in April 2008.
- Presenting posters at conferences to familiarize more people with GMOD. Upcoming and recent posters:
- Managing Next Generation Sequence Data with GMOD
- at PAG 2009, January 2009.
- GMOD: Managing genomic data from emerging model organisms
- at ISMB 2008, July 2008.
- GMOD: Genomics Resources for Emerging Model Organisms
- at American Genetic Association Annual Symposium, June 2008.
- GMOD: Database Resources for Emerging Model Organisms
- at the Arthropod Genomics Symposium, April 2008.
- GMOD: Informatics Resources for Evolutionary Research and
GMOD Tools for Comparative Genomics- both at the IGERT Symposium on Evolution, Development, and Genomics, Arpil 2008.
- Managing Next Generation Sequence Data with GMOD
- Providing in person support and trouble-shooting for GMOD users.
- Spreading the word about GMOD and encouraging its adoption, with a special emphasis on the evolutionary biology community.
Developer Support
The help desk is also charged with helping GMOD developers. In the short term the help desk provides mainly documentation support by integrating and polishing documentation written by developers. In the longer term, the help desk plans to provide integration and beta testing services.
Evolutionary Studies Support
The GMOD Help Desk is a collaboration between GMOD and NESCent. One goal of this collaboration is to assist researchers in the evolutionary biology community who are concerned with the management of genomic information, particularly those generating genome data for evolutionary model organisms. The second goal is to extend the functionality of GMOD tools for evolutionary applications, particularly in the area of managing and visualizing information about genotypic variation, phenotypic variation, and phylogenetics.
Help the Help Desk!
The Help Desk needs your feedback to help guide our priorities. Please contact the Help Desk if:
- You have a suggestion for a tutorial topic.
- You are interested in attending a tutorial either at a conference or at NESCent.
- You have suggestions on conferences or meetings where a GMOD tutorial or poster should be presented.
- You have a suggestion for improving the documentation or web site.
- You want the GMOD Help Desk to send someone to your organization to help with training, setup, or debugging.*
*Small print: The host needs to pay travel expenses.
About
The GMOD Help Desk is a collaboration between GMOD and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), and is managed by NESCent.
Brian Osborne started the help desk in 2006 and, among other things, created this wiki. In 2007 Brian turned over the help desk to Dave Clements. The help desk is also backed up by several other members of the GMOD community, notably Scott Cain, the GMOD Project Coordinator.
The GMOD Help Desk is funded by NIH grant 1R01HG004483-01 under Ian Holmes and NIH grant 5U24GM077905-02 under Jim Hu. Brian's work was funded by a USDA ARS grant under Doreen Ware. We would also like to thank Patrick Phillips of the Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (CEEB) at the University of Oregon for hosting Dave Clements.
Please contact the Help Desk if you need any sort of assistance.