An essential component of self-advocacy is effective communication.
Toward Homeworld’s mission of growing the community of climate biotech, this month’s blog post focuses on an important part of science communication. We spend a lot of time meeting with teams working on exciting climate biotech projects and we’ve come to realize the value of good two-way communication. An under-appreciated aspect of socializing early-stage ideas is the two-pager (also called a pre-read in some circles). While it may seem pedantic, we think this is a useful communication format that is only increasing in importance for people trying to build momentum in their efforts.
To get your idea off the ground, you’re going to need funders and collaborators to buy in. From our grad school experiences, we know the unit of idea-sharing in traditional academia is either the formal presentation or the lengthy grant document. Neither scale well nor are built for feedback. In contrast, professional communities outside academia make use of the two-pager, often drafted in Google Docs or Notion, and we utilize this format ourselves.
So we give you our learnings in the form of a two-pager on two-pagers:
We wrote in light-hearted prose and left in some helpful comments (thanks Doc Brown, Niko McCarty and everyone else who leaves comments and questions), but there is a serious message here. The people who most frequently use two-pagers today are the people in the most privileged positions. Folks who are already in social relationships with high-leverage individuals constantly use two-pagers to accelerate the evolution of their ideas. We can grow the marketplace of ideas by helping all talented people, irrespective of initial network or location, workshop their efforts toward the logical endpoint.
Working on a concept in climate biotech and want to socialize it for feedback or potential partners? Feel free to ping us with your own two-pager at hello@homeworld.bio 🙂