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Speaker: Cooper Smout

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Biography

I care deeply about the environment and finding new ways to live harmoniously with all living beings on this planet. I discovered meditation 15 years ago at a Vipassana retreat in Thailand and since then have been exploring the inner and outer realm with a degree in Psychology and PhD in the neuroscience of consciousness.

I was planning to become a meditation researcher but became disillusioned with academia, turning toward open science and metaresearch as a pathway to creating new knowledge systems. I founded a collective action platform that uses conditional pledges to motivate the adoption of open science practices (Free Our Knowledge), which I’ve since handed over to a new board. My years of campaigning and learnings in this space led me to develop WISDOM, a radically transparent peer-review framework designed to overcome the collective action problem and incentivise contributions to the commons.

I co-founded a community and charity to prototype these ideas (Open Heart + Mind), where we’ve been hosting Burning Man-style events and peer-reviewing contributions as a safe analogue for academia and other commons-oriented communities. Through this process we’ve evolved a simple model that can be adapted to diverse use cases and communities, while retaining a common communication layer to facilitate cooperation.

Alongside my interests in open science and metaresearch, I enjoy singing, dancing, yoga, rockclimbing and snowboarding.