2022/12/08
Progress Updates
Data Analytics
Chris Rozell has introduced us to his collaborator and we got off to a good start at Society for Neuroscience. It seems to be a good chance that this will be our first customer of Neuromatch Data Analytics, now known by NMDA only due to the trademark dispute. Patrick Mineault will help us ensure that this first customer goes very well. The plan is to do an on site meeting to gather needs to determine the type of expertise we need to provide, which we will subsequently hire for.
Recruiting
I am meeting with several recruiters and sourcers this week to see their take on Neuromatch as a sourcing tool or enriched candidate pool for tech companies.
Open Publishing
Progress on open publishing has been slow with the team members being busy with the end of term, Society for Neuroscience, and due to a team issue that arose with Daniel Bingham. Due to some personality and vision conflicts, Daniel Bingham is no longer on the team. To expedite decision making and allow a more unified vision, product owners have been assigned to the ‘foundation’, ‘first pillar’, and ‘Arxiv+’ as they are internally called. Team is currently focusing on product documentation and fundraising and is pausing external collaborator meetings to make progress in these areas.
Conference
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. Both of these things are moving slowly, I think due to a lack of confidence in owning them. Nick will work on helping to instill some sense of leadership in this group and Courtney is going to provide some project structure for community events to reduce the activation energy of running one.
Society for Neuroscience
Neuromatch was at Society for Neuroscience this month. Overall it was a good trip. We talked to around 500 people, approximately half of which were previous students or TAs that simply asked whether we had developed a new course. The other half were people that had heard of Neuromatch but didn’t know what it was. A concerning number of them guessed that we were a dating service for Neuroscientists (this was due to color scheme of the booth, the “for the love of neuroscience” phrasing, and the match in our name).
Mastodon
Neuromatch is hosting and financially supporting a Mastodon instance that is being experimentally run in a democratically governed fashion. Manisha and new volunteers Jonny and Jordan have been heavily involved, along with Brad Wyble, of course, as Brad is involved in everything. Open enrollment is targeted for this week (Friday).
Academy
New Courses
Carsen Stringer is leading the survey work, decision discussions, and data analysis that are going to determine how we make decision on the topic for the 2024 course. Ella Batty has proposed that we could relatively easily develop and run a general coding skills course for 2023, but the team has not discussed it. We made a decision to not pursue hosting a hardware based course (like the Cajal program’s course) ourselves, but Nick has been coordinating with Cajal, NeurotechX and Open Ephys to encourage its development externally so that we can have strong partners to recommend students into our courses as well.
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: $96,876 USD
Lending Club Account: $277,011 USD
TOTAL: $385,887 USD
Fundraising Status
Received Donor Funds and Commitments
The Meta funds are confirmed, they will still honor the payment despite the hiring freeze and discretionary spending cuts. We have received donor funds in this month from Wellcome for $27,000.
We have not received the $55,000 in CAD funds from The Neuro Irv and Helga Cooper Open Science Award, but we did attend the prize ceremony in Montreal and gave a speech that was classified as “very moving and powerful”.
In Discussion Donor Funds
We are still in discussion with Schmidt Futures.
During society for Neuroscience, I met with Dana Foundation, Simons, Kavli, Bernstein, Chen (kind of), and Gatsby.
Simons is inviting us for approximately another hundred thousand in funding for new course development.
Kavli will continue support, but in unclear amounts, which we didn't expect. As a reminder, Kavli unexpectedly doubled their support this last year after hearing about our sustainability plans and seeing the impact report.
Dana Foundation is different and doesn't have a ton of money, but it is building to be a cool partnership model where Dana Centers will basically be guided by NMA to produce NMA style aligned content that we host and deliver.
Gatsby was the least clear message, but my interpretation of the conversation was that they would be open to additional funding for new course launches until we get to about 10 simultaneous courses such that we can more easily front the money on our own.
Overall, this funding is primarily earmarked for NMA activities, which makes sense. This should allow us to assemble some full time fellowship style programs to support development of new courses.
We applied to the NASA Open Science Grant to support Climate Academy. We perfectly fit their program and mission goals, the the technicalities of how they divided their grant applications makes us technically an overshoot for each one as we are a combination of their open grant activities. We applied anyway, of course, showing off that benefit. Total grant funds are approximately $200,000 over two years.
During a fundraising networking meeting in California, I was able to meet a few wealthy people interested in supporting ClimateMatch, but no certain terms yet.
Fundraising Plans
We are still planning to 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.
Financial Projections
Earned Income
We do not have any planned earned income in the next month.
Donations
We have a pending ~$75,000 for receipt in our accounts.
Major Costs
We are hiring a web developer for a salary of approximately $100,000
Runway
The delay in the web developer hire combined with additional grant funding has been kind to our runway projections and our six month safety net entry point has been extended to late 2024.
Hiring, Team Changes, and People Updates
Volunteer Management System and Roles
Courtney has implemented her volunteer management system which allows volunteers to apply to and sign up for specific roles. This system has been rolled out in Climate Academy and is being used to keep track of the many new volunteers coming in there.
Web Developer
We found no suitable candidates in our process and have taken to head hunting and looking for applicants within existing pools that we know more about. Given the layoffs, we may open applications again this week.
Market Trends and World Event Impact on Neuromatch
Iran Situation
Iran has had internet access shut off for much of the country for weeks. We have not heard from many of our Iranian volunteers in this time, and they are difficult to contact outside of this channel. If you know a way to reach out to people you know, it would be a great time to check in with them.
Cryptomarket Slumps
GPUs are cheaper. Possibly cheaper compute costs in courses as local compute offers compete with cloud.
Other Notifications
Trademark Dispute
We have agreed unanimously to fight it. Our lawyers assess their argument as invalid and we do not want to make any concessions. Worst case scenario is they take us to court and win, which is highly unlikely due to cost. If they win, we would lose Neuromatch use, and domain, but no other impacts would happen.