At the intersection of “funding to skill-up highly engaged group members” and “travel”, I think one of our most productive uses of money at East Bay Biosecurity v1.0 was sending highly-engaged group members to biosecurity-relevant conferences or workshops. Conferences have massive networking and learning benefits, especially for people starting in a new field!
We’d pay for the travel, lodging and conference fees of group members on the condition that they gave a talk at the group afterwards about what they learned. We were sometimes successful at getting group members to write blog posts about their experience, too, but I think getting to a 100% completion rate on that would have required more micromanagement.
At the intersection of “funding to skill-up highly engaged group members” and “travel”, I think one of our most productive uses of money at East Bay Biosecurity v1.0 was sending highly-engaged group members to biosecurity-relevant conferences or workshops. Conferences have massive networking and learning benefits, especially for people starting in a new field!
We’d pay for the travel, lodging and conference fees of group members on the condition that they gave a talk at the group afterwards about what they learned. We were sometimes successful at getting group members to write blog posts about their experience, too, but I think getting to a 100% completion rate on that would have required more micromanagement.
You could go further and do a full conference fellowship (cf. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security fellowship opportunity at SynBioBeta 2018) but honestly I think you get a lot of the benefit from ad hoc sending someone.