+1 for The Selfish Gene, one of the best books I've read. If you have any interest in the process of evolution/natural selection, I highly recommend it. It's not as "political" or explicitly atheistic as some of Dawkins' more recent work either, so people who have a negative opinion of that sort of thing shouldn't be turned off by his name being on it.
We are currently working on several advanced features and analytical tools that will be offered as a subscription on individual basis or as a package (enterprise tier, e.g. for universities, companies).
To answer your question on getting big, our focus now is implementation of a platform that is a home to research groups of the world. We have to do it fast, and we have to do it right. In other words, the goal is to get big and be useful. That doesn't mean that our exit strategy is to get bought by a big player.
Awesome stuff! You should make it and see what happens. Many researchers/students struggle with the discovery of research groups, collaboration etc. The more people/companies try to tackle these issues the merrier.
Currently, all research group web pages are scattered across the web and we want to connect them, make them discoverable.
E.g.:
Let's say an undergraduate/graduate/researcher who wants to find all research groups/professors working in a certain field has to scour the web to find a handful of labs that are interesting to him. With Labit s/he will be able to filter all laboratories/research groups that might be interesting to him/her. And as user base grows the benefits of having all labs connected into a single network will yield even more benefits.
The above example is from personal experience of mine and my peers and the reason why we started to work on Labit. And there are many more similar examples that can be thought of.
Re Design:
Customization of the design is one of the top requested features. We are working on it. That being said one of the goals of the platform is to organize information in a structured way. We are still not sure how availability of deep customization will affect overall structure, ease of use and discoverabilty. This is something we are experimenting with. Locking down most of the structure and design of the web pages, while allowing minor customization might be a good thing in the long run.
I would love to hear your argument on adding advanced customization options.
> Let's say an undergraduate/graduate/researcher who wants to find all research groups/professors working in a certain field has to scour the web to find a handful of labs that are interesting to him. With Labit s/he will be able to filter all laboratories/research groups that might be interesting to him/her. And as user base grows the benefits of having all labs connected into a single network will yield even more benefits.
This requires you to actually get "all the research groups" to migrate their sites to your platform, which would be difficult to achieve (particularly if you restrict them to a design they don't want).
I have strong reservations about your apparent aim of making a single for-profit company the gatekeeper to the websites for every research group.
An alternative way of making research groups discoverable would be to create a directory of researchers that links to their existing websites, rather than trying to replace them.
> This requires you to actually get "all the research groups" to migrate their sites to your platform, which would be difficult to achieve (particularly if you restrict them to a design they don't want).
Exactly. The platform will be increasingly more useful as user base is growing. The same is applicable to majority of other networks. It is most likely that we will have to continue onboarding users almost "manually" until we reach a critical mass.
> I have strong reservations about your apparent aim of making a single for-profit company the gatekeeper to the websites for every research group.
Good point. As researchers ourselves, we have tendencies to favor open-source projects/organizations over for-profit companies. There is no denying it. But considering all the things, I believe that for-profit companies achieve their goals much more efficiently. Simply put, we are a social purpose for-profit company started by researchers who got tired of redundancies, poor discoverability, lack of sane structure etc., and are trying to build a solution.
I am interested to hear your opinion on some of your points above. Could you elaborate on your reservations? What is it that you are most concerned about? What could we do to improve on that apart from going non-profit?
> An alternative way of making research groups discoverable would be to create a directory of researchers that links to their existing websites, rather than trying to replace them.
As you have said it, this approach will work to make research groups discoverable. However, it would be difficult to solve many other issues we are trying to solve. A single platform is a better option in this case, as it allows deeper integration and interconnection.
I think that you are attempting to address several distinct problems that would be better addressed separately.
For example, catalog of shared facilities/equipment across groups is a useful thing to have, but it can be centralised without centralising group web sites (and constructing a list by simply aggregating lists of what individual groups have will miss facilities shared at the department/division/university level).
I trust my university to continue providing web hosting. If I were to switch to your service, what assurace would I have that you:
- will continue operating for (at a minimum) several decades
- will continue providing the service for free, and not start charging
- will not add adverts
- will not redesign or remove a feature that I rely on
- not loose data (how should I backup a Labit page?)
as you grow, your costs increase, and network effects cause people to feel 'locked-in'?
The 'lack of sane structure' and 'redundant effort in designing' problems can be solved by creating good templates that researchers can use to create sites hosted by their own universities. I think that most lab pages that I've encountered have had a reasonable structure, and in many cases switching to the Labit structure would be a regression rather than an improvement:
- several pages are empty for many of the showcased sites, suggesting that they are not necessary, but cannot be removed (e.g. Gallery)
- details of people on the 'Members' page are displayed only on a modal panel after clicking on a person's face. It also doesn't seem to show the destinations of alumni, despite the medium article saying you want to help career planning.
- it is common (at least in certain fields) for papers to have a dedicated page on the group's website, grouping together the abstract, embedded demo video, links to supplementary material, etc. This doesn't appear possible with Labit.
> I think that you are attempting to address several distinct problems that would be better addressed separately.
For example, catalog of shared facilities/equipment across groups is a useful thing to have, but it can be centralised without centralising group web sites (and constructing a list by simply aggregating lists of what individual groups have will miss facilities shared at the department/division/university level).
Our experience with how labs operate tells us otherwise. I think that close integration of various aspects of research activities will be valuable not only from the networking point of view, but also it will allow us to add "feature layers" for improvement of the process itself.
> - will continue operating for (at a minimum) several decades
Same as with other major networks, you will be able to download all you data. This feature is on our to-do list.
> - will continue providing the service for free, and not start charging
This is contrary to the purpose of the platform. The core functionality will always be free. We want it to be free. We plan to monetize advanced features and analytics that will be built on top of the core features.
> - will not add adverts
My co-founders and me are strongly against advertisements.
> - will not redesign or remove a feature that I rely on
Good point. We will have to make sure to gather extensive feedback before we make big/breaking changes.
> - not loose data (how should I backup a Labit page?)
This feature is on our to-do list.
> as you grow, your costs increase, and network effects cause people to feel 'locked-in'?
Also a good point, but a bit premature in our case. As of now we are focusing on delivering a good product to users who need it.
> - several pages are empty for many of the showcased sites, suggesting that they are not necessary, but cannot be removed (e.g. Gallery)
Yes. Believe it or not, I raised this question on our meeting recently. We are working on this.
> - details of people on the 'Members' page are displayed only on a modal panel after clicking on a person's face. It also doesn't seem to show the destinations of alumni, despite the medium article saying you want to help career planning.
Thanks for the suggestion.
> - it is common (at least in certain fields) for papers to have a dedicated page on the group's website, grouping together the abstract, embedded demo video, links to supplementary material, etc. This doesn't appear possible with Labit.
Awesome idea!
jamessb, thank you for taking your time to write out such a detailed reply.
Your question is quite common among our first adopters. We have talked with representatives of a few universities. As of now they don't have any objections. However, we are working on clarifying this with other universities in US and Europe.
In any case, the functionality that Labit currently offers doesn't pose a risk to individuals and research groups. Moreover, many labs host their pages on Wix, WordPress, SquareSpace etc. and their university administration doesn't mind. I think that these are the reasons why there were no objections from administration so far.
And a question for you in return.
How important for you is the ability to have a custom domain for your research group? On a scale from 1 to 10.
10, since it is policy here to use a subdomain of the university.
Of course, all data hosted on the lab website is usually not sensitive. But I know of a couple of unis where the policy is quite rigid and they simply do not allow any external hosting. Do you have any plans to allow self-hosting? It seems to work quite well for wordpress and ghost...
For those cases, where the policy is very strict, we are going to contact universities directly first. If that doesn't work then we will have to find a way to allow self-hosting while preserving the connection to the whole platform/network as that is the main purpose of the service.
Can you tell me the name of your university? You can send me an email (rc[at]labit.io) if you would rather not share this information on HN.
And regarding custom domains. We are definitely working on that. It is our top priority right now.
You'd imagine that most everyone with marketable IP would insist on self-hosting on an air-gapped network. Uploading confidential and potentially valuable data to a cloud run by an unaccountable individual with no serviceable address would be a no-no for many.
Here is a link [1] to a post on Medium written by my co-founder and a link [2] to our YouTube page that has some tutorials if you want to know more about Labit.
As it is with many ventures, Labit started out of frustration. We are a team of 4 people (2 researchers and 2 software engineers). We were frustrated that laboratories and research groups around the world were working in a relative isolation. Their webpages are outdated, unorganized, scattered on the Internet, and in many cases broken. This realization sparked a discussion that led to creation of Labit.
Is there an API to obtain data from your site? I'm assuming two of the biggest features researchers will want is a "faculty acquired" and a "grant won" brag-post system. It will be interesting to see what data comes out of those two features. Who gets money, what do they do/buy with the money, who do they subcontract with that money, how long does it take to get money, who stays at their institution with their money, what PIs constantly win grants, etc.
Creating and maintaining an informative page represents a substantial investment of time by laboratory personnel and the return on that investment is largely dependent on the durability of that information online.
Because laboratories tend to have longer life cycles than web projects, I am curious about Labit's model for achieving sustainability over a period of ten or more years.
Very cool. It's like a CMS adapted for a research groups (a.k.a. labs --- note potential source of confusion since lab can also mean actual lab with test tubes etc).
One thing that I found confusing is the lack of pricing info. Is this going to be free and if so how will you pay the hosting bill when you get 1000+ freeloaders?
Or do you see it as a run-it-yourself free software?
Hi there. Good questions. We will be introducing pricing for some advanced features (that we are working on right now) and analytics later, but the core functionality will stay free. We are covering the hosting bill with the help of some local startup programs and some bootstrapping for small things. And currently we are actively seeking funding from investors/accelerators. Some are interested, but waiting to see if this gains traction. So right now, we have to onboard as many users as we can, get feedback from users and then we will have a considerably higher chance to find some funding.
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"Deep Work" by Cal Newport
"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond