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Facilitator's note, May 1

Dear Life Sciences Supermind,

Thank you so much to everyone who has participated in the exercise thus far! We’re excited about all of your contributions and appreciate your creativity and activity so much!

If you have not yet had the chance to submit an idea, please log in to the platform using the unique link emailed to you to participate. More information on how to log in and contribute if you hare having any difficulty is appended below.

We hope you can submit 2-3 ideas this week in your areas of expertise. Please feel free to contribute more if you like! We also encourage you to comment on or support others’ contributions. We are enjoying the back-and-forth on some contributions and hope you are similarly enjoying interacting with your colleagues from around the world!

We’re impressed by the diversity and breadth of ideas you have shared so far, particularly within the Future of Scientific R&D and Public Health categories. As a reminder, in this phase we are looking for a wide variety of ideas. We are seeing some contributions that are highly technical, and others that are policy-related or community-oriented. That’s fantastic. Keep up the great work!

We want to flag that the Resilient Manufacturing, Supply, and Distributions Chains and Disruptive Technologies categories could use some more contributions—we would love for you to share more ideas in those areas if you are able!

Synchronous Super Sessions May 10-18
In addition to the asynchronous conversations that occur on our online platform, we also plan to hold three synchronous, virtual small group discussions. We are calling Super Sessions, and they will be limited to 25 people. Participants will engage with a leading expert pertaining to that category (e.g., Disruptive Technologies), review prior contributions to the platform, and break out into small groups to create new contributions.

These Super Sessions will occur between May 10-18 (we are still finalizing the dates and times). I’ll send more information on how to sign up in my next message.

Kindly let me know at dkong@mit.edu if you have any questions. And if you encounter technical difficulties, please contact Adriana Koenig akoenig@mit.edu.

Thank you so much again for your energy and enthusiasm!

Sincerely,
David Sun Kong, Ph.D.
 

Logging into the platform

You should have received an email from Life Sciences Supermind admin@lifesiencesupermind.org with a unique login link (URL) that is yours alone. Follow the instructions in that message to gain access to the site.

After you log in once, you will be automatically logged in each time you return to https://www.lifesciencesupermind.org.

If you would like to use more than one device, you’ll have to log in with your special URL on each device.

If you have not received an email from admin@lifesiencesupermind.org, please contact akoenig@mit.edu.
 

Life Sciences Supermind Process

The first phase of activity will open at 9AM Eastern US time on Monday, April 26. That morning, I will send out a note with specific instructions to get started on our first activities.

During the first two weeks of the exercise, participants will contribute ideas; during the third, our team will categorize those contributions by topic; and during the final week, participants will be invited to vote on which categories they find the most interesting and show the most potential to have impact in the future.

Several times each week, I will send a message to participants that will include instructions about what and how to contribute. The messages will also contain brief summaries of the inputs so far and address any aspects of the process that require clarification.

When you engage with the platform, I encourage you to be creative and expansive in your thinking. We plan to share insights from this process with the public, but we will not attribute specific ideas to particular individuals, and the conversation itself will be private and only accessible to invited participants.

All contributors are asked to adhere to the Chatham House Rule, which states that “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker, or of any other participants, may be revealed.” For more see https://www.chathamhouse.org/chatham-house-rule.