Guiding Change Towards Agency
Brian Bot in his own words | A Network50 Spotlight
By Brian Bot
In the US and elsewhere, the biomedical research process is closed across many facets — culturally, professionally, legally, and technically. For all but a tiny percentage of accredited scientists, the traditional roles available to us are passive: as human subjects in research, as taxpayers funding research, as consumers buying downstream products. But the technical aspects of biomedical research are more and more resembling the early days of personal computing: the hardware is getting better, faster, cheaper, smaller, and more widely distributed. This creates a moment to ask, should those traditional roles change? And if so, how, and to what end?
I have always gravitated towards roles that are hard to describe at cocktail parties, roles that often span disciplines. At Sage Bionetworks, I focus on the intersection of biomedical research, technology, and policy, and how those forces come together to not just create our roles, but how the norms for healthy community building in the sciences affect those roles. I love exploring the incentive structures that help diverse efforts converge towards common goals, and to guide change towards the kinds of roles that give us all more agency in science.
I’m fascinated these days with the gathering places that are central to healthy communities, be it a church, mosque, sports arena, school, crossfit gym, city center, or town hall. These gathering places are safe spaces for the community to assemble, converse, debate, and even disagree. Along with the rest of culture and society, many of these gathering places have moved online.
This shift from fixed physical locations to virtual and decentralized ones offers tremendous promise. At the same time, given the relative anonymity that the internet can provide, there are risks inherent to these virtual communities. It will be important to develop and refine the social norms needed in order to promote a healthy internet. We, as community builders, need to create spaces which are as warm and welcoming as the more traditional ones.
I am personally interested in exploring the broad trends of decentralization catalyzed by the emergence of the open web and cloud computing. At its heart, this work is rooted in building trust between diverse stakeholders as well as with the public at large, and the trust necessary for healthy communities to thrive.
Taking part in the larger ‘open internet’ movement has allowed me to share these experiences and learn from others in adjacent fields, as many of the challenges we face in biomedical research are not unique to our field. In a time where facts are under attack, it is even more important to support the broad dissemination of information and knowledge — and to fight for the roles that we want, not the roles we are given.
Brian Bot works as a Principal Scientist at Sage Bionetworks. He has been a part of the internet health movement as an Open Science participant. He is a member of our first cohort of “Network50.” Read his recent interview with Mozilla.
