Hi everyone!
We are entering the post-COVID world and we, as CoronaWhy, still exist.
The world has won the fight with coronavirus psychologically but not physically, people are still dying and recent spikes are a great example of why the society has failed to address this pandemic.
I am truly fascinated by what we've created together: back in April my biggest fear was "what if all these amazing people disappear when COVID is gone" and guess what, it's not happening, we are even more active and pushing the boundaries of impossible every day! The most intelligent and the most supportive people I've ever met, and I've never met any of you in real life. And I want to, really want to have us all connect in real life at some point.
Because the work we are doing is absolutely extraordinary and recent major updates are the best proof.
Monday - June 22
9:30 AM PST, 12:30 PM EST
https://meet.google.com/uya-ebws-mts
We've been approached by historians/economists to overlay COVID-19 data over the historical Hispanic flu pandemic for the potential forecasting and handling of unfortunate consequences of the socio-economic crisis, like job crisis by using sentiment analysis of text snippets from newspapers/radio/TV, etc.
There is way more than we have put into the sheet, some people are literally working full time and without weekends:
Feel free to open the spreadsheet and add yourself if you are committed to contribute and help us bring more awareness to all the amazing work that is being generated inside our community.
It's happening, we are everywhere. and open science is not just a utopian dream but an ambitious dream to pursue.
That's why I believe that we will exist tomorrow, weeks from now, and years from now.
And maybe, someday, researchers won't have to fight for funding to cure cancer, medical journals won't have to fight for survival and make a business out of publishing papers, conferences won't be judged by the prestige of citations, young scientists won't have to struggle to survive financially and more importantly: the age, race, sex, the difference in opinions simply won't matter anymore.
What will matter is impact, transparent collaboration with a single objective function to benefit humanity, with reproducible science at its core, with companies funding collaborative research and medical journals, with governments supporting scientists by all means possible and with endless curiosity to push the boundaries of our advancements as a civilization.
All these amazing things are happening not because of the money (there is none involved) but because of us being bound to our Values (what we believe in), Principles (how we deal with reality) and our Missions (our short and long term goals).
It would be stupid of us not to take this timing serious and act, that's why we do it, YOU showed up in March, in April, in May, in June, yesterday - because you CARED enough to do something about this situation, the situation that everyone told you is not changeable. We have shown the world it's not true, we've shown the power of the individual, and the power of a community of like-minded people.
It's time to build, it's time to change the world, for good.
There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow as Walt Disney would say, and tomorrow is just a dream away.
This week, we had a very very long call about establishing an entity, primarily because:
- We don't want to ruin the volunteer spirit of our community
- We want to stay open-source but we also want to make sure we are sustainable and people stay with us for the good and have some form of benefits of doing so, monetary or health insurance or any other important basic securities/needs
- We need funding of some sorts because currently Artur is funding all the expenses using his own personal cards and that accumulates, $5000 credits from Google are ending, free slack plan is also ending and will cost us $2500 monthly
- We need to protect members of our community from any attempts to scrutinize them, be it malicious or accidents like accidentally releasing sensitive information of 3rd parties or individuals to the open world, GDPR and other compliances are mandatory for the nature of the work we are doing
- Our partners/sponsors that are already doing pro-bono work also need to make sure they are doing it right and have some relationship with us as an organization, like SonguePR which is a PR firm helping us with communications
- We need legal help for the above (funding, protection, partnerships) and need a legal entity for that
#non-profit-entity - June 18, 2020 - sync on vision, structure and entity
Conversation with Erwin Hosono
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erwinhosono
Erwin is an early-stage investor at Mighty Capital. Non-profit board member at Future Problem Solving Program International and Future Problem Solving Program of California.
03:47 – The organization’s informal mission is to transform science into more open and transparent
07:25 – Registering the organization as a non-profit under section 501(c)(3), 8 to 12 months process with IRS 1023
09:57 – CoronaWhy name and brand then what happens to it post-Corona
13:08 – post-Corona branding due to possible fatigue factor on the name from a donor perspective
17:59 – Successful venture investors into philanthropists, cited example on thenext50.us
19:39 – Venture part of the organization, reverse model of impact VC’s, non-profits or a B corps?
21:44 – Traditional venture capital model, communicating with donors as a non-profit
24:38 – Profit model if decided to be a B Corp, entity into a platform with external product lines
29:49 – Repeatable process and resources are the tech infrastructure, people, credibility, connections, and funding – Creative Artist Agency (CAA) model analogy
33:24 – People in the organization are posed as potential users
35:18 – Organizational structure diagram, different levels for vision, mission, resources, industry focused on research
38:24 – COVID-19 is just an stepping stone, the next step is an open science
40:15 – A need to become an entity that can define code of conducts, mission and vision
41:57 – Dichotomy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar from Linux, a need for aggressive open-source license
44:41 – Design thinking exercise, back to user-need insights, CoronaWhy started from two things – ability to work in extreme uncertainty and collapsing wave functions
47:27 – Design thinking exercise approach, micro level of the individual projects and finding common needs, AI literature review project
49:13 – Core people full-time equivalent (FTE) commitment, unmanagement factor
51:28 – It’s not just about COVID-19, but it’s about bringing people together
54:06 - Andreessen Horowitz using CAA model, potential similarities
55:30 – Segmenting model approach, first entity is dedicated to COVID-19 then create another entity later on not necessarily in the U.S.
57:14 – Table of projects, with its daily progress and team leaders
59:12 – Negative connotations of being a VC
1:02:28 – The path of least resistance, short-term vs. long-term optimization, social impact investor is a slow-moving group
1:05:04 – Creating self-fulfilling loop of AI and human annotation
1:09:36 – Artha Impact platform as a benchmark for creating entity
1:13:19 - Looking for successful B corp with similar structure
1:14:26 – Consequences of evolving from non-profit into profit-driven organization
1:17:02 – Rare to non-existent cases of starting a non-profit then turn into a for-profit
1:21:02 – Donor’s point of view could be a good return of investment, non-profit and for-profit’s perspectives
1:22:59 – Thompson Reuters TrustLaw pro-bono network of lawyers and their requirements in working with them
1:25:22 – Main motivations in getting non-profit/foundation might be to establish the entity and asking/applying for grant
Hope you made it till the end of this post, thank you!
Artur Kiulian
Founder of CoronaWhy
