2023 Quarterly Roundtable #1

Hello and welcome everyone. This is March 31st, 2023's Quarterly Roundtable, number one from the Active Inference Institute. Welcome to the Active Inference Institute. We're a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning, and practicing Applied Active Inference. You can find us at the links on this slide. This is a recorded and an archived live stream, so please provide us feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following video etiquette for live streams. Today we're going to be checking in with our regular quarterly roundtable series. We're gonna first provide some updates from the institute scale, then we'll talk about ongoing education and research projects before concluding with some thoughts on the institute's paths in the coming year. So first, would the two of you like to introduce yourself? I'm Daniel. I'm a researcher in California and also the president of the institute. Alex? Yes, hi. My name is Alex. I'm a vice president of the institute and also an educator in systems thinking. Please go ahead. Hi, I'm Blue Knight. I'm an independent research consultant in New Mexico and the secretary for the active inference institute. Back to you, Daniel. Awesome. Well, let's begin with some views on the institute at the organizational scale. First, just as a summary overview, put us off to the side. We engage with our niche and provide services to it on multiple fronts. Here, who we are and what we are is reflected visually. At the institute scale, we have several groups, including the ones that we'll be describing in the coming slides, the board of directors, the officers, and the scientific advisory board. We have two organizational units, somewhat like departments. These organizational units help support a wide range of projects related to education and research. Any general comments that you'd like to add? Yeah, let me add here that, yes, we are using this kind of simple schema, but it actually represents our our vision to have this hierarchical structure explicit and representing our attempts to align with the active inference approach for organizational side of our activities. So, here we have connections to the niche and different scales of institutions, in general units, projects. We are having attention on keeping our structure alive and see how it's which affordances it provides us to development. As we undergo morphological development. And just to give a bit more information on the governance, the board of directors serves to implement institute scale, formal strategy and governance. They specified and provide oversight for the officers who are closer to the day-to-day operations at the institute. And the board of directors applies active inference at the organizational scale. In contrast, and in complement, the scientific advisory board assists with a wide range of tasks to reflect their diverse backgrounds and approaches. So let's talk a little bit more about the BOD and the SAB. First, as to the board of directors, our 2022 to 2023 board of directors are listed here. And we've recently confirmed three of us here on this stream as the officers, again, close to the day-to-day operations and who one is speaking with most likely when they email the institute. Currently, we are working towards our nonprofit tax exemption status, 501c3 status for our nonprofit. And we continue to highlight BOD's dimensions, business, operational, legal, technical, and social. Anything else that either of you would like to add about our formal organizational structure? Let me possibly add here that it's on the process of development. It was like needed legal activities to have all these people, all these roles for the legal structure of institute. And that's great. So great people we have on board. And like from the site, as I see it, even having a team of this size, the process and structure became more complex. And all such changes took more time to…