It is essential for independent researchers to be part of active, maintained communities. These should be as close as possible to university lounge rooms, conferences, and email chains. The work to create the infrastructure to organize, engage, and run an independent science building requires one full time person as well. This would be a critical project. Here are some ideas: **An active, helpful and engaged realtime online community** Jess Carr and I maintain and engage an independent science discord. We've found that discord works well because it's casual, un-intimidating and social. It works near real time, and has enough people such that it's been personally helpful to myself and others,. We have around 700 global members who are pretty active. But Jess and I have learnt that community engagement **takes a lot of effort**. - Jess has scheduled meetups on the discord, which has been central to getting people engaged and motivated. We could improve the experience by having scheduled meetups in London or other parts of the UK. Ideally we would have a team arrange meet-ups every week, in coworking spaces where project leads and supervisors can come and trouble shoot people's problems. - We need a way to continually provide 1-1s and track people's progress at scale. - This is something that I am doing! - We would need a way to make the discord feel more 'prestigious' so that we can get more and more qualified people on there. Right now we have some people from academia, like Gabriele Carcassi (UMich) and Joseph Tooby-Smith (founder of PhysLean), but need orders of magnitude more than this. - I've often been helped by people on the discord when working on CFD and biophysics - there should be ways for a platform to 'autosuggest' people to reach people with expertise in the area they want. **The ability to go to conferences** - This is essential, there should be someway for people to go to conferences that are hosted by academia. The main issue is that conferences and travel is expensive. I'm not sure how this would work economically but is important enough that I should mention. **Better communication that independent science can be done well.** - I made a Youtube channel on independent science (10k subs) and Substack (1.2k subs). These have been effective at getting people . I've got 100k+ views on youtube. I would love to be able to actively maintain this channel and Substack, which requires time and energy. ### Other communities and approaches - RenPhil's Higgs Community - [https://onscienceandacademia.org/](https://onscienceandacademia.org/ "https://onscienceandacademia.org/")