Thursday Community Call Recap 10.20.22

Hello everyone! Welcome to the weekly Thursday Community Call Thread. We really want to engage our community to think and learn about new topics in these calls. Unfortunately not everyone gets a chance to attend the call and those that do don’t always get a chance to speak due to time constraints.
There is value in continuing the types of conversation we start in these calls. We don’t want the call to be the last time people engage with the topics addressed. We want to enrich your days with inspiration and open eyes to new concepts. These topics might be applicable to some of your works or spark a personal interest. It is our goal to facilitate new ideas and creative thinking through this thread.

Community Call Link: The Future of SCRF - SCRF Community Call

10/20 Community Call Recap:

This week’s community call was a short presentation by Eugene and a discussion about the vision and future of SCRF. These ideas presented are not meant to be a definitive definition of SCRF’s vision, but rather a conversation starter around getting a collective idea of what our vision is. Given that there is some recent growth in SCRF - we are moving from a single funding source to multiple - we want to think about how do we best accomplish our mission?

This being said, I would like re-announce that Protocol Labs will be coming on board as a funder! We are also actively working on more grant submissions as we start becoming a 501(c)(3)

The starting point to think about vision… is what is our mission?

Eugene postulates, “SCRF’s bold mission is to bring together researchers and builders to create groundbreaking web3 advancements through actionable research.”
Given this idea, how do we not just highlight research, but rather have a collection of interrelated activities that create a bias for action around research? We want the ideas to be sticky and reach the correct people who need them.

So what are the different components of SCRF that come together to see this mission/vision into implementation?

  • Curation and Discussion - The cornerstone of SCRF is of course the forum. Within the forum we have many components that curate research, finding the most popular, interesting, and beneficial articles. What we want this curation to do however, is maximize high quality discourse among our community to provide value and high quality feedback.
    The writing cohort is an excellent example of an initiative that is creating high quality discussion on the forum, while also providing value to its members. This is likely something to be recreated in the future as well!
    There was formerly a mentorship program at SCRF… and there are thoughts of bringing this back? What kind of mentorship would you all find beneficial? We want to focus on specific mentorship rather than a broad sense of the word, so input would be welcome.
    Given the direction of SCRF, we are thinking about evolving to include elements of peer review in a traditional sense here at SCRF. Any thoughts on how this could be shaped to be the most valuable?
    Additionally, we would like to support new journals and generally be aware of who is publishing research.

  • Facilitation - We’ve been focusing on facilitation via discussion, live events, workshops, etc… but is this the best way for us to facilitate knowledge to people who need it? Our focus is creating valuable, long tail discussion for positive impact and facilitation of knowledge

  • Outputs - Since the start of SCRF, there’s been a variety of outputs from SCRF in the form of forum posts generated from research that already exists. Things like highlights, summaries and research pulse create this valuable information we’ve been trying to produce.
    We have also taken the route of funding new research prior to our own funding changes.
    We even, at a time, were thinking about broader public good outputs like a smart contract audit database to spread the open source ideals and provide a valuable source of usable data for other researchers.

  • Networks - There are a lot of different networks we want to tap into at SCRF. We have to find how to appropriately interact with people across them and find ways to bridge them. This is overall an overwhelming thing to do, so how do we find the right balance of networks and people to work with? We can continue broadening our content and actions and community to find what is the appropriate landscape of problems and needs so we can fill the gaps efficiently. From there, we may even be able to create a new network eventually.

  • Primary Research Components - Should we start getting more involved in research and explore filling the gaps that projects have? It might perfectly make sense for us as a neutral organization. What kinds of programs can come out of this endeavor?

These are some of the ideas of where we started, what we are building and where we are going.

A few more questions to consider

  • How can we help academics get their work in a position to be published? What are the best avenues for this? Is us starting our own journal the best for reputation building?
  • Is there a direction you all see us moving that has not been discussed?
  • How do we increase visibility of SCRF?

If any of these spark your interest or you have other questions / thoughts, please discuss below!

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A noteworthy fact is that a journal is only as good as its editorial team, so when discussing reputation building, an active editorial team should be taken into account in order to produce a high-quality manuscript.
Based on informal indications, I believe journals are the best venues for publishing.
I will agree that launching a journal is good for establishing a reputation, but not the best when taking into account the quality of its reviewers, online accessibility, and visibility.

The diary would be a good goal, though, if all of these things were done.
The fundamental objective, which is to develop a revolutionary web3 advancement is still the goal hence directions are still in place.

What I’m unsure of is how to make SCRF more visible but But raising awareness through advertisements and posts on sensible forums like Nairaland isn’t a bad idea.

After reading this post, it appears that this information might be helpful.

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