From the community, by the community, for the community - Aug '22 Company Update

I recently started writing public company status updates.?You can read more about why here.

Ask 1:?we are launching a "community fundraising round" where _you_ can also be an a.i. investor! If you want to give us feedback on our campaign landing page or get more info about this, reach out (only open to Canadian residents - sigh, I know- regulations and stuff...)

Ask 2:?We are looking for 2 new founding members:?Sr. ML Developer. Please pass on to anyone interested

Previously at Aggregate Intellect...

In?July '22?...

• We talked to many investor leads from collision and got excited about some of the leads
• We launched a process for our community projects to easily lead into follow up projects
• We refined the pre-release version of our graphical knowledge navigator

See also:?May '22 | June '22

Here is what happened in August 2022:

Some of you might not know our origin story! so, here it is:

In early 2018 I got promoted to a management role and since not being able to code as much was anxiety inducing, I talked to as many people that I respected as I could. The conclusion of all that was: "take the management role because you can build more, but stay close to the technical side to stay relevant."

Fantastic advice, right?

Easier said than done, but this was one of the handful of pieces of advice that completely changed the course of my life. In a few weeks myself and a bunch of nerdy friends were already meeting up after work to discuss papers every week. It was literally a calendar invite I kept duplicating with the new topic and location. Friends of friends started joining, we started a slack workspace for ongoing conversation, and a youtube channel for those who were missing our conversations.

In less than a year it started feeling like a community, a place of belonging, a platform for exchanging ideas, a channel for meeting new friends and co-workers. By this time there was already a core team, a steering committee; a group of people who were helping me run things, each focused on a topic area that was most exciting for them. I met people who eventually became founding members, employees, and influential community members. And just like that, aggregate intellect, the company, was born and started growing.

We are now a team of 10 full time staff, 500 weekly active community members, 10's of community groups doing interesting projects led by remarkable researchers and practitioners. Our software product and business plans have evolved a lot over the years, but one thing has remained constant: community!

Community was the birthplace of our company and all the product ideas we have explored.

Community is our channel for knowing that we are still building the right product.

Community will always be how we measure if the value we are creating is worth the effort.

When we started our fundraising preamble a lot of community members reached out asking if they could invest small amounts and unfortunately we had to say no to them. The prospect of having a complicated cap table and how that would affect future investments was a strong enough barrier that prevented us from doing what we really wanted: sharing the ownership of aggregate intellect with our community

Fast forward to June, we met someone at Collision that completely changed the story! I met him at a networking event and told him about our community and all the great things happening in it. He lit up and asked if I knew about the regulation changes that allowed all (well, most) Canadian residents to invest in private companies (kinda sorta like they do in public companies in the stock market) up to $10,000 a year! He told me about how their platform allowed us to streamline the legal process, importantly including handling the cap table issue. I was intrigued. I discussed it with my team, and met up with them a few times in July and we finally pulled the trigger! We now have a way to share ownership of aggregate intellect with our community without the legal / financial complications!

August was the month when we dealt with all the paperwork and prepared all the campaign material. We wrapped up August with everything ready for the private launch of our "community round" campaign; we have already shared the campaign with several core community members who were interested in investing. We are using these early conversations and investments to refine the process for the public launch of the campaign scheduled for late September.

What were the highlights of the month for the team?

Community & Product

Our community department spent a lot of time preparing the material necessary for the community round campaign. That effort is still going on based on the early feedback we are getting from our core community members.

Another important line of work in the community, inspired by our community projects, was how we can improve the quality of the recipes that are created. Importantly, how might we create streamlined feedback mechanisms for the creators so that they can improve their initial work.

A bonus achievement in August was launching our new "reviewer sub-community" who provide feedback to the contributors about the downstream usability of their recipes - Ammar

This also sparked the need for revisiting some of the details of knowledge curation that is facilitated by RECIPEs. After numerous initial user interviews, we ran an intense design sprint to quickly refine the ideas we were exploring.

My proudest contribution in August is running a design sprint with my teammates and getting feedback from the users and working on the library design and its functionality for better user experience - Sara

and of course this was a close collaboration between product and community departments.

?My proudest accomplishment this month was conducting a design sprint with Sara [solid partner!], and the experiments that led to it. This will lead to a more natural recipe creation experience - Ammar

Product and Dev

We also spent time rethinking the library experience where people can organize the resources they hoard.

The thing that I am proud of has to be the library page design which will make it easy for users to interact with and manage their resources - Eyob

We hope that the new designs as well as new features, and well bug fixes, will significantly enhance our platform usage

The work I am most proud of this month is fixing bugs related to resource creation and adding new features to the chrome extension - Muluwork

Speaking of the library experience, our first commercial feature which is access control in library is coming up soon!

In addition to some deployment tasks, I was focused on implementing private recipe logic which will allow users to control who can see their research - Samuel

The graphical navigation is, of course, the hottest news in the dev department these days. In order to deal with large graphs extracted for more extensive projects, we needed to implement a scoring / recommendation mechanism to guide the users through a progressive navigation of the graph, what we call internally: the default view.

I developed the node scoring for recipe concept map. This score allows rankings concepts based on their importance and make the project mind map more readable - Percy

My proudest contribution in this month is the front-end implementation of the default view feature for project mind map. which will enhance user experience - Bereket

We used our learnings about better graph navigation and also improved the graphical navigation for the search experience in our product.

In addition to working on the private recipe logic, my proudest contribution this month is upgrading the search graph experience - Fasile

We continued working on our second integration as well which is projected to be released in alpha next month.

The feature that I am most proud of is the slack app. The ease of use of it will allow users to save assets much more frequently - Rehana

Parting thoughts...

I strongly believe that building a successful product in a rapidly changing field like AI is only possible if it is embedded in a community. We would not have been able to get as far as we have without our community. I am hoping that all the value we added to them is a sufficient way of saying thank you to them: a better way to manage their technical knowledge; a much more direct way to access experts and peers; and finding friends, co-workers, employees, and employers. I am excited to take this to the next level by sharing the ownership of aggregate intellect with them, with you! Reach out if you want to take an early look at how you can invest in aggregate intellect!

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