Thinkable launches ‘communities’ to help the world learn, fund & collaborate with scientists
Our core mission at Thinkable is to accelerate scientific discovery by providing a new way for the world to engage, fund & collaborate with researchers from across the world. We are excited to share our latest innovation on that journey by announcing the beta-launch of Thinkable Communities.
At Thinkable, we’ve now hosted 50 grants & prizes from our innovative partners, mobilizing our community of verified researchers to engage, ideate & collaborate with them around scientific objectives. We’ve helped award nearly $1million to our science community from over 1,800 cutting-edge research projects from acoustics to zoology.
But this global diversity presents a challenge for us in hosting funding opportunities & better showcasing our partners & researchers. A research prize in Bioinformatics for example is interesting but not very useful to an astronomer. A PhD scholarship eligible to those in the USA is not helpful to those in Australia.
It was clear we needed to develop a better way for our researchers to efficiently learn about engagement & funding opportunities around their relevant science while showcasing their submissions. At the same time, we needed an easier way to allow anyone to engage with relevant verified researchers around their knowledge. Thinkable communities is a step towards solving that problem.
Thinkable Communities: the place to engage with science
We have launched communities within 16 broad fields of science from Astronomy to Medicine. Our communities will become the primary focal point for how researchers engage with Thinkable since all relevant funding opportunities, competitions, submissions, events & FactChecks will be updated continuously in relation to your primary field.
All of our partners and researchers now have the option to share their Thinkable competitions and submissions to the relevant community pages to allow much wider outreach beyond their hosted competition site and profile pages.
Each community page will always permanently showcase our current list of verified researchers, active Thinkable funding competitions & the latest submissions relevant to the field. For example, our Medicine community encompasses 1,115 verified researchers covering 71 different fields from cardiology to virology. It aggregates all relevant funding opportunities and showcases new submissions from our community.
The home feed however allows anyone to post something useful to the wider research community. It must be relevant but all you need to do is share a link and hit return — a title, summary and image will be profiled in the community feed, just like any typical social media feed. For example, if you would like to promote an upcoming seminar, workshop or conference you can easily share those events to each relevant community page (More on how to use events in a later post).
We understand a vast amount of research grants, prizes & competitions are hosted externally to Thinkable. Anyone can now promote relevant external funding or job opportunities within the Thinkable community feeds. This allows our research community to more efficiently have access to programs to help accelerate their research careers.
Our journey so far at Thinkable has been like a science experiment. Unwaivering in our mission to help researchers but with unknown outcomes, we have been very willing to test, trial and shelve ideas that don’t work. We would love for our verified researchers to test out communities for themselves. You could post upcoming seminars, workshops, conferences, PhD opportunites in your lab, negative results or any idea you would like the wider community to learn about. Remember, if you are looking for collaborators outside your field to help your research (eg statistician or data scientist) you would post to the relevant community (Mathematics in this example).
By empowering our researchers to easily find relevant funding opportunities, share knowledge and opportunities within the wider research community, we hope to not only support our researchers, but advance the frontiers of knowledge and innovation that is our core mission.
Thanks everyone.
Ben McNeil
Chief Scientist, Thinkable.org
