2022/08/18
Progress Updates
Strategic Plan - 2022 -> 2025
We have made some progress on developing this. We have moved to hiring both a developer and a volunteer coordinator/project manager. Further, we have agreed upon taking next steps on NMDA and are attempting to secure clients. We are still in broader discussion on Academy strategy and are receiving input from the executive team in the form of their summary document. We will revisit the recruiting strategy after securing the web developer needed to make it happen.
Data Analytics
We have a website mockup ( www.nmda.io ) . We are still producing some additional marketing materials, including our team pages. Sean and I are in discussion on what a contract might look like for a long term grant. I am meeting with Brian Pepin of Rune Labs during my San Francisco trip as he is one of our three target customer types. Next steps are finalizing marketing materials and sending me to do business development work to find potential clients.
Journal
We are getting much closer to aligning our thinking on a model that makes this a viable project to pursue. We are still in the process of stakeholder interviews and will likely not make substantial progress on this without more involvement from volunteers and a web developer. Explicit next tasks are finishing our stakeholder interview list, consolidating interview learnings into a report, adjusting the whitepaper into pitchable material, and fundraising to support development of the initiative.
Conference
NMC 2022
NMC is somewhat behind schedule, compared to last year, on securing Keynote speakers, but is somewhat ahead of schedule on tech platform development, talk structure and format, and announcing the conference. We were really pushed to the wire on getting the website turned over due to several factors:
- A lack of access. Tittipat controls access to NMC private github repo, the private Airtable, private AWS, and private Firebase accounts.
- Tittipat was on vacation and couldn’t easily grant access or help guide others through the process.
- A lack of process. There are some semi-hidden aspects to the implementation of the Neuromatch conference website (build scripts, SSH info, etc) that couldn’t have been easily figured out without Tittipats help or knowledge.
Next steps are sending out our email invitations to signup and submit talks/abstracts, write in the Reddit API scripting and YouTube Scripting, and find people to serve as front end and back end moderators for each of the talks. Otherwise we have normal process steps in the future such as reviewing abstracts, contacting presenters and attendees, etc.
Community Events
Patrick, Megan, and Shubh (a volunteer) are making the matching event happen at CCN. I was going to go help with matching, but I think I am mostly just going to meet Megan now.
Academy
Existing Courses
Academy was executed with success, arguably with fewer fires, burnouts, or problems than before, though this is not quantifiable and I am the worst possible judge. Despite this, Ella is quite concerned about the overwork and overpressure in the position, especially on the executive director role.
The initiative to create better processes this year and focus on SOP development has not panned out so far. I have tried to push this along post NMA by writing up an SOP template and offering to hire Manisha as admin for additional time to work on this. Our new project manager will familiarize themselves with the tasks of NMA by constructing SOPs through interviews and work with the volunteer departments.
Next steps on NMA development are development of the strategic plan by the NMA board with input from the executive team through the summary document.
New Courses
The ClimateMatch team has been given a website, domain, and are doing regular meetings that have grown to approximately 12 people. They are fully adopting almost all aspects of the Neuromatch model, but may attempt for a 2 week course instead of a 3 week course at launch due to the workload of course production.
We are having a hard time having people from our team be willing to help advise the new course team, and with a lack of procedures and SOPs, it has been somewhat difficult to give them explicit plans that are helpful. I am attempting to guide them through the process one step at a time, first focusing on curriculum development and a recruiting pipeline.
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: $53,000 USD (estimated)
Lending Club Account: $410,803 USD
TOTAL: $475,803 USD
We are in the middle of the TA payment process, and we will probably end that process around $370,000 in September.
Fundraising Status
Received Donor Funds and Commitments
We are still waiting on disbursement of $50,000 from Simons and $20,000 from Wellcome Trust. We have received $6,000 from Stanford.
In Discussion Donor Funds
We are having a difficult time coordinating Konrad Kording to meet with Schmidt Futures. We completed the Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellows Proposal for $950,000 dollars, but with Konrad on vacation in Europe, scheduling has been hard.
We have made progress on Facebook and they are preparing to send us the $25,000 and discuss next steps on in-kind donation of software developer time.
Clearer Thinking was supposed to get back to us by August 15, 2022, but they haven’t yet. They say they are still evaluating applications.
Otherwise, no significant changes from the last update. Fundraising activity was slow this month.
Fundraising Plans
We have several introductions/leads we haven’t followed up on well enough. I have not begun explicit raising for ClimateAcademy except for from Schmidt Futures; this will start in the next couple of weeks.
Financial Projections
Earned Income
We have no expected additional income in the short term. We will see some from Neuromatch Conference in September, but lower than expected because we couldn’t get enough developer time to integrate payment into the process.
Donations
No upcoming immediate donations besides the ones described above.
Major Costs
We have approximately $100,000 left of TA payments pending.
We will hire a volunteer coordinator at ~$50,000 salary to start in September.
Runway
Hiring, Team Changes, and People Updates
Volunteer Coordinator
We received approximately 100 valid applications over 5 days. Majority (>85%) were female presenting. We did 20 first round interviews (volunteers attended several of them for professional development). We will send 7 to second round interviews where I will be joined primarily by Megan and Kate. Offers going out by next week.
Web Developer
After a discussion with our tech volunteers this week to let them know of the posting, we will likely post this position next week. Job description has input from Tittipat and will have some input from Patrick.
Executive Team Rework for Neuromatch Academy
We are moving back to single executive team members for next year. We could look at consolidating some departments given the new hires. I am trying to be hands off and let the NMA board give input there, but the intersection with the new hires makes that difficult, and it is also very important to the function of the company. This will be a discussion point in our meeting.
Volunteer Management System
Maryam has finalized the volunteer management system and we are preparing to deploy it. Effectively, it will allow volunteers to sign up for roles they want to be a part of and offer a way for team leads to identify volunteers that are on their teams and evaluate them on whether they are active or not. Since there is a lot of cross-talk in Slack, the existing channels don’t necessarily serve this function. This is a step towards volunteer job descriptions that will give volunteers clearer expectations around commitment, tasks at hand, and how to do them.
Market Trends and World Event Impact on Neuromatch
Economic Downturn
Google and Meta have frozen hiring. Many other tech companies are laying off employees. Now is a great time to hire a developer. Now is a good time to make relationships as a recruiter, as many recruiters will fall out of the business.
Inflation
This is a US-centric view as it is hard to keep track of inflation in every other country, but we need to be increasing TA payments and salaries based on inflation. This is currently set up in our financial modeling.
Bird Flu, Monkey Pox, and Other Epidemics
Additional concern around other transmissible diseases may continue to drive down traffic at international conferences.
Other Notifications
None.