Before corona, JustOneGiantLab helped citizen-scientists meet the SDGs. After Covid, they think they have a new system for massive collaboration
the JustOneGiantLab logo, shaking out the possibilities
We’ve been tracking how networks of collaboration have arisen to meet shortages and needs - emotional, practical, edible, medical - during the coronacrisis. The great question is: which of these structures will persist, as we tentatively edge back out into normal, working, civic, hedonistic life?
The answer is: probably the ones who were vigorously practising a collaborative ethos and practice before, and took the Covid-19 crisis in their stride. This seems to be the case for JustOneGiantLab (JOGL), a French-based network which describes itself below as:
Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) is the first research and innovation laboratory operating as a distributed, open and massive mobilisation platform for collaborative task solving.
JOGL helps humanity to sync onto fixing our most urgent and important problems using Open Science, Responsible Innovation and Continuous Learning.
JOGL partners with academic labs, companies, startups, foundations, NGOs and public services to create participatory research programs for understanding and solving Health, Environmental, Social and Humanitarian issues.
…By making the process of contributing to solving important challenges accessible and valorizing [valuable?] for anyone, we want to multiply the number of contributors by 10 (from 5 millions to 50 millions) in 10 years.
While making all produced knowledge, tools and methodologies universally open for use and adaptation.
Humanity has way too many problems to fix to solely rely on traditional institutions.
We want to offer anyone the opportunity to challenge themselves by launching or contributing to collaborative initiatives focused on some of humanity’s most urgent and important problems.
Most often, communities and initiatives that need to scale look at creating their own platform. Most fail because it is really hard. We want you to focus on scaling your actions, not changing jobs.
Most of the problems on this planet cannot be solved using traditional business models as most people cannot pay for research and innovation to create solutions. We don’t lack skills, resources and creativity, just of an efficient way to connect them.
They started a few years ago orienting themselves to addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals with appropriate scientific and research projects. (Indeed in the sign-up process, you are asked to select the SDG goals that you’d most like to work on.)
You might already be asking: what a huge job of management and coordination, to connect up all these volunteered talents to the right projects! How could it be done?
Expectedly, Just One Giant Lab has turned to artificial intelligence, to help it read its network and make the right project suggestions that sign-ups would want to be involved in. Speaking to the website Makery, one of its founders, Marc Santolini, explains:
The idea is that behind JOGL there is a network of actors. These actors are connected to projects they follow, to people they interact with, to skills, needs and lots of other objects that are on the platform. This network of actors is called a heterogeneous information network.
The algorithm predicts potential connections on this heterogeneous network. In other words, we can predict a connection between two people that doesn’t yet exist, but based on the structure of the network, we can say that it should very probably exist.
We can also make recommendations based on certain meta-paths within the network that we want to push, for example, matchmaking skills with needs, or between similar projects.
[Their white paper describes this system as the Brain, whose algorithms maps participants as in the graphic above]
When Covid-19 came along, JOGL swung into action - setting up an Open-Covid-19 programme, which not only does this AI coordination between volunteers, but also provide micro-grants below €3000 (as they say, “the smaller the ask, the likelier it will be granted”). You can see the map of projects they amassed by the end of April:
“We’re trying to build an algorithm that avoids echo chambers and maximizes collective intelligence on the platform”, continues Santolini.
One of the most helpful projects instigated by JOGL is work undertaken by the London-based AI for Good London community, aiming to help aidworkers with AI-driven prediction models for the transmission of infection through refugee camps (see the embed video below, and the Makery article).
They’re currently assessing “the challenge of stabilizing and sustaining such open collaborative projects in the longer term,” says Santolini. “New members of communities that scaled up quickly can easily get lost, and smart onboarding strategies are key to sustaining such efforts”.
We’ll watch their assessment with interest, but also with these questions in mind.
Could this kind of AI help community organisations, and those wanting to be involved in the civic level of their societies, match up projects with people in the same way?
Could it accelerate forces that aim to engage citizens, in a trustworthy and accessible way?
How can those citizens get to judge the judgements of such “Brains”?
We’re open-minded on these developments. Whatever tools can help creative people power.