Thanks for this feedback - it's very helpful! 1) Yep. This I know. The tech is the easy part, by far. Any suggestions on which fields might be most open to

Thanks for this feedback - it's very helpful! 1) Yep. This I know. The tech is the easy part, by far. Any suggestions on which fields might be most open to this approach, and where to approach them? 2) Good point. At the moment, there is a lot of technical work to do, so that's where my head is. But if we get big enough to where we can afford it, community moderators who can help guide the community towards a collaborative approach and gently nudge back some of the egos I've already been told (many times over) are a problem were already on the list. Social scientists are a great suggestion that I had not thought of. 3) This may be an area where we disagree - at least partially. I understand the need to talk to peers in a mutual language, and I'm not arguing against that. My thought is that this platform could help provide space for translators. Papers and responses would be in the technical language of the field, but I've thought about including a (heavily moderated) peanut gallery below for translators to help the lay public understand the work. One of the issues that has been front and center in the pandemic is that a lot of bad vaccine science was easily accessible to the public, and when it was done intentionally by snake oil salesmen, intentionally made easily understandable. But the good stuff was locked up behind paywalls or hard to understand. There were translators on social media who did their best to answer the concerns but there weren't enough of them. There are a lot of people not currently in academia who have enough of a foundation to tell snake oil from the real deal and who could help translate, with access. Right now, they don't have access. So you wind up with PDFs of "1000 papers showing why vaccines are harmful" getting shared around and no easy way for people adjacent to the communities where they are being shared to counter them. Additionally, science is supposed to be an open process - we're supposed to trust it not because of appeals to authority, but because, in theory, we can replicate the reasoning and experiments that got us to our current understanding. Now, of course, replicating the experiments is mostly impossible for the lay person at this point, but someone who's interested and has the time should be able to follow along. We can't say, in the same breath, "You should trust science, because it's open and you can replicate it" and "Oh, you can't understand this." We need to create space for scientists to talk to each other, and for translators to help the public understand and follow the conversation in real time. We would all benefit from a greater understanding of all aspects of science, and from the increased trust that come with understanding.