Serendipitous alignment of 3 non-traditional funders... among other unlikely events!😄 I agree with the premise of this thread but it omits a crucial element of 'bottom up' catalysis that enabled generation of the FAFB-FlyWire dataset. It was not a centrally planned project. 1/2 - ThreadSky

dddavi.bsky.social • 72 days ago

Serendipitous alignment of 3 non-traditional funders... among other unlikely events!😄

I agree with the premise of this thread but it omits a crucial element of 'bottom up' catalysis that enabled generation of the FAFB-FlyWire dataset. It was not a centrally planned project.

1/2

Reposted from David A. Markowitz

The recent complete mapping of the fruit fly brain — a landmark achievement — almost didn't happen. It required serendipitous alignment of 3 non-traditional funders. 5/14 www.thetransmitter.org/methods/full...

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kamdh.bsky.social•72 days ago

From what you know, is this vastly different or similar level of autonomy at other big initiatives, eg Allen Inst

dddavi.bsky.social•72 days ago

Rather, when people (mostly but not entirely at Janelia) saw what we were doing, they said, "That is cool. I will help." They had discretionary power over their own time and resources. Rick Fetter agreed to section a whole brain (!). Bill Karsh decided to try his aligner on our data.

2/n (not 2/2)

dddavi.bsky.social•72 days ago

@herrsaalfeld.bsky.social and Khaled Khairy came in on alignment. @bogovicj.bsky.social built a crazy database that could store hundreds of millions of image transformations. Misha Kazhdan at Hopkins applied his scalable intensity correction. Et al. et al.

3/n

dddavi.bsky.social•72 days ago

My point is not that the centralized architecture/business model @davidamarkowitz.bsky.social proposes is bad -- the opposite! But an ingredient for our success and I think many other surprising technical successes was autonomy at the level of 'leaf nodes' in the org chart

4/n

dddavi.bsky.social•72 days ago

And it is to the credit of Gerry Rubin and other architects of @hhmijanelia.bsky.social that the funding & social ecosystem of the place permitted and encouraged this. A successful (albeit frequently painful!) hybrid of autonomy & central planning.

5/n

dddavi.bsky.social•72 days ago

So @davidamarkowitz.bsky.social, if you succeed in realizing your vision, I hope that you think carefully about this aspect: the balance between central planning and individual autonomy. And crucially, the individual (lab/person) cannot be fully committed -- some excess of capacity is required.

6/n

davidamarkowitz.bsky.social•72 days ago

🎯

dddavi.bsky.social•72 days ago

My 2 cents, HTH :)

7/7

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