#neuromatchstodon — Public Fediverse posts

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We are excited to welcome new members to our working groups!🎉 🥳

@lina has joined our technical working group!! She's a senior full-stack developer extraordinaire who helps us fight git, patiently teaches us #DevOps concepts, and is one of the #MastoDev who contributed to the #ExclusiveLists feature that got merged upstream to base #mastodon 🙌​

@elduvelle has joined our social working group!! She's a postdoctoral #neuroscience researcher in the field of (rodent) spatial cognition, is always ready to help new members feel at home here, and has played an instrumental role in the organization of #Maystodon #JoinMastodonDay and #NeuroParty 🙌​

We thank you both for your outstanding contributions to our community at neuromatch.social and #fediverse ❤️​🙏​ @gratitude

-- on behalf of the #SocialWG #TechWG at #neuromatchstodon, with lots of respect, admiration, and love from @manisha & @jonny

@silentashes
thanks for sharing your feedback!
I think we are on the same page. While our instance is in our bootstrapping phase, we chose discord for backend communication because some of us were familiar with setting up a community server and it was easy to manage things there while we figured out what would be our within-instance communication strategy after our processes (governance, rules, CoC) were fairly established.

We currently self-host our decision making system #loomio (https://www.loomio.com/) which is #FLOSS under #AGPL license (https://github.com/loomio/loomio)

We have been discussing how to avoid having to use too many platforms (and having to create different accounts for each) to cooperatively govern the instance because those can become bottlenecks for instance-level participation in important discussions. We are discussing a way to self-host our own forum #lemmy (relevant thread: https://neuromatch.social/@manisha/110641946898243726) but we are volunteers and so our progress has been according to our limited bandwidths (we are trying to get funding though, so pointers to funding sources would be appreciated -- other than the crowd-sourcing ones like OpenCollective, Patreon, etc, we are aware that several #MastoAdmin use that). And how fast we make progress also depends on how much support we can get from other volunteers from our #neuromatchstodon instance to help out with this stuff.

We are slowly but surely working towards using open-source tools and self-hosting and making it easier for instance members to participate in discussions (which is why we let them know to reply to our OP here if they don't want to go to discord).

We currently run a fork of #glitch which allows local-only posts. I had tested that but there was a tiny bug there (e.g. https://neuromatch.social/@manisha/109753892418948128) that I haven't had the time to look into. But that's another option worth considering for instance-only discussions with caveats like this -> replies to local-only posts can become public and then the thread may seem weird for those who can't see the OP.

Given the cooperative structure that we are establishing, we will likely not move to #DiscourseSoftware if we can't have all of our instance member switch there easily (but I don't know the details fully so this is just going off of what you mentioned)

Thank you for pointing us to #Mobilizon. Have you tried it or know someone who has? I'd love to hear how the experience has been there, especially if it uses #ActivityPub

sorry for this #LongPost :)

cc @socialwg

We are exploring new ways of running Neuromatch Conference (our international conference on Computational Neuroscience). How would you like to see it run this year?

Global Online Conference: Previously, we have formatted the event as a global online conference. In this case, there were no timezones. The conference had live sessions evenly spread over 48 hours, and all sessions were recorded and forever viewable.

Mind-matching Networking and Discussion Event: Talks recorded for this conference would be clustered into interest areas. You would be matched to a short playlist of talks that match your interests. Later, after you've watched them, you would be matched using our algorithm to a group of likeminded scientists and your group (which may include authors from original talks) would be given prompts to help you discuss them and your own research in context.

Other: Help us think about other ways to make online scientific communication better

@[email protected] #neuromatchstodon #neuromatch #NeuromatchConference #NMC #ComputationalNeuroscience #neuroscience @neuroscience @academicchatter

Yo #neuromatchstodon, would you all be up for a watch party this weekend or next weekend?

Let us know in the replies which one you want to watch. Preferably a movie that is freely available to stream around the globe (such as those on https://archive.org/details/moviesandfilms). It could be a #neuroscience movie or not.. the idea is to have fun (with light-hearted commentary from neuroscientists 😄​)

Folks from other instances are definitely welcome to join us!

This is a part of the #maystodon initiative by @elduvelle and others. the credits for the watch party idea go to @jonny

#neuromatch @neuromatch @maystodon

🧠🤖#Neuromatch is thrilled to be part of the new $20M #AI Institute for ARtificial and Natural Intelligence (#ARNI) funded by #NSF!

👩‍🎓Partners: ARNI is a collaboration between Columbia, Baylor College of Medicine, City University of New York, Harvard, Princeton, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mila Quebec AI Institute, Tuskegee University, the University of Pennsylvania, and UTHealth Houston.

#neuromatchstodon @[email protected]