The largest dematerialized laboratory

They are bio-hackers, makers, engineers, researchers, students or even retirees. From their offices in Johannesburg, their lounges in Hanoi or their maids rooms in Paris, they tirelessly exploit, and at different times, the flood of data available to study the new virus. Their goals are common: to model the progression of the global epidemic at various scales, to predict its rates of spread and to imagine solutions to shortages of medical equipment. To do this, two clicks and an acronym: JOGL, Just One Giant Lab.

It all starts from an initial hypothesis, that of Thomas Landrain, one of the co-founders, one of the co-founders, himself a biologist. “I was led to observe the fabulous phenomenon of the creation of learning communities and to observe their achievements in several points around the world. The proof of concept being carried out here, in Paris, but also in several American laboratories such as at MIT, I asked myself if we could not go further in the process by imagining a giant laboratory, without partitions, without partitions, without borders, without geographical boundaries.”

Without the right to look at their career, or their CVs, and by eliminating all social and economic biases, they are developing an online laboratory capable of interconnecting voluntary citizens. “The one and only driver for us comes from the motivation to want to solve a common problem together.” A JOGL member must keep in mind that each response to a specific problem can have an impact on the daily life of another member of the community.” For the co-founding biologist, the principle is simple: “if a citizen's subject speaks to another citizen in the community, he can help you, participate, and deepen the theme with you. For us, it is on this paradigm that the idea of the collective is based.”

Still in the prototyping phase in winter 2020, the epidemiological context that began in Wuhan in March 2020 significantly accelerated the development of the laboratory. “Before, when we pitched the project to potential investors, financial partners or even institutions, most people saw little of the real applicability of such an online space. I think it was too abstract, too complex to imagine. At the time of lockdown, when we have all experienced confinement, when we know that remote work can become a reality at any time, we understand the value of knowing how to make contact, work, and collaborate remotely,” underlines Thomas Landrain.

Useful and efficient, in the space of three months, the laboratory multiplies by 10 the number of contributors on its platform. “We went from a few hundred people to more than 3000 contributors around the world. In 1 year, we exploded the scores with multiple Covid prototypes that met specific field conditions and specifications.” And for good reason. Researchers in New York answered problems in Johannesburg and citizen experts in their field in the Philippines designed solutions for other individuals in Senegal. “With all this, we realized that the strength of the collective lay in our ability to know how to get along despite our differences. Our greatest pride is to be able to connect volunteer people who have not yet found a common space to discuss.”

Funded by the Axa Research Foundation to the tune of three hundred thousand euros the first year, JOGL managed to develop. “The Foundation understood that the world we lived in today was highly complex and that it was necessary to create possible spaces in which people from civil society, experts or not, could contribute to the momentum and collective effort. By choosing to support us, they are not just supporting a research laboratory, they are at the origin of the outbreak of hundreds of projects, more or less emerging, more or less successful, more less scalable and which have a great chance of seeing the development of a solution for the future” adds the co-founder.

With collective intelligence and the peer notification system, the community regulates itself and chooses, using its own criteria, to select projects that are worth consolidating and seeing the light of day. Contrary to the classical model, it is no longer the financial partner who selects with its performative bias, but the collective who chooses what is worth solving in relation to the urgency of a context or the potential reproducibility of a large-scale project. This paradigm shift was significant in the way in which the partners who followed were approached. “We are convinced that we are opening a third path, where everything is not based only on economic profitability.”