2022/11/10
Progress Updates
Data Analytics
Manisha Sinha joined the board committee of NMDA. Her experience in consulting and project based science services is going to be helpful in guiding NMDA to success. An effort that crosses the border between NMDA and Academy is underway. Jon Matthis, Patrick Mineault, and Alish Dipani are working on a proposal to Sloan foundation for a course and mentorship program to teach code management and project management skills to early career researchers.
Open Publishing
Open Publishing project has been more officially joined by Ila Fiete and Daniel Bingham. Ila has been working on a vision for Arxiv+, an improved pre-print service that has systems for encouraging review while managing user reputation for pairing better reviewers with papers. Daniel Bingham is a software engineer that left his tech job to focus on building Peer Review, a similar system for allowing publication and reviewing using a model similar to Stack Overflow. Daniel’s product is in early alpha. We are beginning fundraising for this project using both Ila and myself.
Conference
NMC 2022
NMC 2022 was a success and went off without any significant issues. The Reddit threading was not as integrated into the conference as hoped due to a lack of web developer time available on the team and a lack of instructions provided to attendees, but talks were well attended. We are struggling to get videos on to YouTube after the conference due to a lack of time available to our technical people on the conference side, which is holding back our pre-print linking.
Community Events
Deepak is leading the organization of an industry to academia and back panel targeted for mid-January. Regina is gauging interest in people looking to help in running a new Neuromatch podcast.
Academy
New Courses
The academy board has agreed upon providing support to make Climate Academy successful for 2023 while working on course development for a 2024 course that is oriented towards more general data skills and potentially a younger audience (pending analysis of NMA 2022).
Financial Report
This is an overview of Neuromatch accounts, upcoming and anticipated major expenses, and a recap of our runway.
Treasury Review
Bank of America Account 1: $12,000 USD (estimated)
Bank of America Account 2: $97,064 USD
Lending Club Account: $278,472 USD
TOTAL: $387,536 USD
Only a couple of TAs have lingering payment issues. I am working with them on direct wire transfers. Jitasa is being helpful.
Fundraising Status
Received Donor Funds and Commitments
We have issued the invoice to Meta to get our $25,000 grant, but recent layoffs and cuts to discretionary spending are a concern. There is a small chance that we will not get this grant despite it being awarded. We are still coordinating $20,000 from Wellcome, but I cannot access the final report form as I was not on the original grant. Trying to coordinate with Sean.
We missed the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Climate Grant due to an insufficient subject fit (it had a health focus we do not have).
We won the Neuro - Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation Open Science Prize. Nick will speak in Montreal on November 30th to accept it. It comes with 50,000 CAD for Neuromatch and 25,000 CAD of salary support for various members of Neuromatch.
In Discussion Donor Funds
We are still in discussion with Schmidt Futures.
Fundraising Plans
We are planning to apply to the NASA Open Science Grant, submit a grant to the Sloan foundation for a lab skills course and mentorship program, and begin fundraising from CZI, Fund Open Infrastructure and others for the journal project. Nick is meeting Brainmind in California in early December for general fundraising networking. Similarly, Nick is attending SfN and meeting with several potential funders or partners such as Dana, the Alba Network, Science Communicators social, NTX, and others.
Financial Projections
Earned Income
We do not have any planned earned income in the next month.
Donations
We have a pending $95,000 for receipt in our accounts.
Major Costs
We are hiring a web developer for a salary of approximately $100,000
Runway
I have slightly lowered expectations on student attendance to climate and neuromatch academy for next year.
Hiring, Team Changes, and People Updates
Volunteer Coordinator
Courtney has started and she is amazing! She is working on defining roles and responsibilities (picking up on the work of the team leads and operations in providing more structure to positions). Additionally, she is working on a detailed project plan for an academy course and helping Climate Academy get ready to recruit their volunteers. She is doing this after finalizing and improving upon Maryam’s volunteer management system.
Officer Changes
Courtney has also been appointed an officer position: Secretary. Nick adopts CFO role in addition to current role.
Web Developer
We are interviewing for this role actively. We had many applicants, but they were of medium quality. We have identified a few people that could be decent candidates.
Executive Team Rework for Neuromatch Academy
Executive team is going back to single roles. Several departments have been collapsed into single departments to reduce the total number of departments and team leads to make it more manageable and to provide more intuitive grouping of tasks/responsibilities.
Holacracy
Courtney and I are in a learning program on a method of self-management and decenrtalization of management functions in Neuromatch. We are looking to more officially bring these values to the organization at large, but are finishing the study program first to propose to the board.
Market Trends and World Event Impact on Neuromatch
Economic Downturn
Stock market returns and dips may slow down foundation and donor funding. Soaring interest rates may help provide different methods of returns for smart funders. Sustainability is increasingly important.
Tech Layoffs
Approximately 40,000 tech employees were laid off in the US in the last 3 weeks. This is a good hiring environment, theoretically, and a good time to start new projects.
Other Notifications
None.