:: Introduction to the Fusarium Community Platform (FCG)

Sharing experience and knowledge is essential to help leverage new knowledge and educate the next generation of researchers and educators. Without an efficient mechanism to support such effort, scientific endeavors will be fragmented and become inefficient. The FCP aims to support the preservation and sharing of experience and knowledge accumulated in the global Fusarium research community through the web technology.

Since the inception of the World Wide Web in 1990s, the Internet has quickly become an integral part of our everyday lives. The information content, services, and applications available through the Internet have been growing exponentially and very diverse. The Internet enabled large groups of people to dynamically communicate and closely work together without being limited by distance and traditional forms of organizational structure. Through these communities and supporting web technologies, web users have been evolving from passive content consumers to active content creators. This transformation of the web is often referred as .web 2.0. (Li and Bernoff, 2008; Tapscott and Williams, 2006). A number of scientific communities have built a web platform and associated databases and material resources to support community research and education. However, this potential has not yet been widely harnessed.

The FCP plans to provide quick reviews of latest research development, experimental protocols, educational modules, and community news via a blog interface. The trail of communications associated with the archived content, especially protocols, will help new comers to the community quickly learn from the collective knowledge rather than learning them through trial and error. Because it is web based, the FCP will also become an ideal medium for rapidly sharing information on emerging disease problems and coordinating subsequent responses. We envision that the FCP will also function to support global human networking.

*Correspondence concerning FCP should be sent to:
Seogchan Kang (sxk55@psu.edu; 814-863-3846)

References Cited
Li, C., and Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Cambridge, MA, Harvard Business Press).
Tapscott, D., and Williams, A.D. (2006). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York, NY, Portfolio).