More updates on team selection

October 30, 2024

Hello everyone!

We have a few updates below in regard to the matching process and next steps for participants, leads, and mentors. Please reach out with any questions!

TL;DR:

Participants: Don’t worry if you’re not matched to a team. We’re creating a new default general team that is managed directly by Humanity Unleashed.

Leads: Please continue your technical onboarding, drafting research proposals, reviewing literature, and coordinating with potential team members for your subproject.

Mentors: Please reach out to project leads to connect or message @David Bell or @Eddie Zhang if you would like to discuss where best to contribute.

General: We’ve created some broader project channels for groups of subprojects that are highly cross-functional.

Participants

Included in the information on the notion page is an update to our process geared toward ensuring all participants can both contribute meaningfully to the overall project and get something out of the process educationally. The short version is that students who are not matched with a specific subproject team will join an aggregated project team administered by Humanity Unleashed directly. This team will not have background requirements, and you do not need to take any action to be placed on this team. The team will work on various tasks appropriate to individual contributors’ backgrounds and skills in support of the overall project, and participants will have the opportunity to work with and potentially join other subproject teams depending on their desires and contributions moving forward.

To additionally clarify on the subproject team matching process currently underway, there are three ways you can be matched to a subproject team:

  1. The team lead identifies you as having skills uniquely valuable to the team and reaches out to you to ask you to join.
  2. You are proactive about reaching out to a specific team lead and making the case that you can contribute meaningfully to the team's work. Note that many subproject teams can only take a limited number of people, and leads may not be able to accommodate even some well-qualified applicants.
  3. Those who are not otherwise matched to a subproject team will join the general team administered by Humanity Unleashed and will have the opportunity to assist with multiple subprojects and join a specific subproject team down the line. Meaningful contributions will still be reflected in authorship on the related papers, just as they will be for the related subproject team members.

Leads

We have met with most of you over the past several days, but just to reiterate and to share this information more broadly with the effort:

  1. If you do not have an adequate number of team members, you should review the project matching form submissions and identify and reach out to individuals who are particularly qualified to participate in your project. To prevent confusion, please update the “Selected Team” column in the notion database with your team’s name before you reach out to a given participant.