Kia ora folks,

Following the WMMC2019 conference, we've established a slack workspace to facilitate interactions within the marine mammal genomics community outside of conferences, especially seeing as we are spread over so many time zones/countries, to help stay in touch and share tips, tricks, trials and tribulations. All who work on (or are interested in) marine mammal (or their bugs!) genomics (or genetics!) welcome, so please feel free to flick this email on to others who might be interested (apologies to those who have already received this email through other channels).

Slack is a bit like twitter and the old internet chatrooms from back in the day had a baby. It is a workspace limited to those who have the link (pasted below), so is a bit more private than twitter, but you can still do much the same stuff in it (e.g. directly message folks if you want to start a direct conversation with them). I've found it pretty handy for sharing useful resources with folks in other groups, without spamming them with a ton of emails (e.g. you can check into the slack as rarely or as often as you like).

To join up to our slack space, you'll need to head to:
https://join.slack.com/t/marinemammalgenomics/shared_invite/enQtODgyNjMyMDg2ODE5LTk2MjdiNTk4ZThhZThhZTYxZjZjNjczMWVhNjU0ZTNlNzJlYWJlMjg5Y2EzYTE2OWJmNmM1MTY3ZGRlN2I3YTY

After you've signed up, to log back into the slack space in the future you just have to head to the following URL and sign in with the email address you signed up with: https://marinemammalgenomics.slack.com. Alternately if you go to slack.com you can search for our workspace, which is called 'Marine Mammal Genomics Community'. There is also an app for smartphones, but I haven't figured that one out yet, sorry :)

Once you get into the workspace, the slack is split into channels to help group messages together (handy if you sign in only once a year and then there are a bazillion posts to read!). At the moment we've got the following (however I am very happy to add more if you reckon we are missing a channel that would be useful!):
# community_engagement: Discussion related to communication and inclusion of local communities in our research
# edna_and_adna: eDNA and aDNA (e.g. low copy number target) related chatter
# field_and_lab_techniques: Tips, tricks, and troubleshooting obtaining and preserving samples
# functional_genomics: adaptive SNPs or candidate genes to local environments (adaptive stuff)
# general: Any general tidbits that would be useful across all our geneticsy fields
# hq_genomes: Chatter related to generating HQ and VGP-quality genomes
# kicking_it_oldschool: Discussion for tried and tested microsatellite and Sanger sequencing markers
# microbiome: Microbiome and pathogen genetic analyses
# random: A place for non-work-related stuff
# rna_seq: Transcriptomics and gene expression chatter
# reduced_representation_sequencing: RADseq, GTseq, and other kinds of NGS reduced rep sequencing
# software_and_bionformatics: A place to share and get help about software and bioinformatics packages

I'm hoping this might be a useful way to keep in touch as a community, and to support each other in the neat science that is going on in this space.

Ngā mihi (thanks),

Alana
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