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: SCRF Community Call - September 8, 2022 - OpSci Project Presentation - YouTube
If you have thoughts on these main questions, please do share!
9/8 Community Call Recap:
This week we had two presenters from OpSci - Shady and Nanak
They gave us an overview of their organization, OpSci. OpSci is creating documentation for DeSci and beyond, focusing on building a DeSci stack. They are thinking about the components to build self sufficient knowledge creation and discovery for communities that are web3 native and have their own internal mechanisms for coordination and incentive alignment. Their goal is to have these communities perform more effectively in creating reproducible research than the existing status quo for software science today.
What is DeSci?
For any of you who are not familiar with DeSci… a quick definition taken from the presentation: DeSci is a nascent web-native movement seeking to deploy scientific applications on decentralized internet protocols that are autonomous and community owned. There is promise of automation and incentivization for science applications that are decentralize.
What is OpSci?
Their website defines them as “a community of open science activists, researchers, organisers and enthusiasts that have come together to work on the problems of data sharing, reproducibility, incentive alignment, coordination, and intellectual ownership that plague knowledge creation today.” Their main value add is to empower researchers to be able to share data more easily as well as build infrastructure to scrape data and put on OpSci.
What is OpSci doing?
OpSci is focused on DeSci primitives, specifically focusing in area of coordination of community to identity systems of DeSci.
They have started collecting information on demographics that are involved in DeSci communities
Their findings are that the participants are:
- Investigators
- Hackers
- Coordinators
- Curators
- Communicators
- Artisans
Link Credentials On Chain
Get into a registry of scientists to be parsed by other organizations.
Working on DeSci Fellowships – How to build research networks and incentive systems to get people to make high quality content (like SCRF)!
Working to create Autonomous Science Data Commons – It is important to move science to web3, but what is the value addition? Additionally, how does one build an interoperable, data verifiable system that computes stores and accesses system identifiers. How web3 can make this more efficient?
Handling issues of reputation, performance, scholars, and incentivization
Impact Certificates - These are similar to IP NFTs, but without the IP. They are used to represent open access research and generate funding for individuals preemptively and organizations after the fact. They link to on chain and off chain credentials
Holonym
Holonym intends to work on the DeSci Identification problem - How do you know who a scientist is on chain when the only ID option is a wallet address?
Introducing Publiuc Key Infrastructure solves this. Here are the main points:
- Compliance - The values of web3 seem to be at a clash with the government. What is a way to be compliant while protecting web3 values? Zk will be the thing to provide this solution. OpSci is working with Lobby3 to provide proof of residency without actual information being shared
- Syblis Resistance - Voting,consensus and airdrops are vulnerable… How do we make sure someone doesn’t have a bunch of identities through many wallets? How do we bridge web2 crededentials while maintaining ambiguity?
- Recovery - If you lose private keys, you can have web2 ID credentials linked to show ID without disclosing information
A few questions to consider
- How does Web3 make DeSci more efficient?
- What can zk add to credential systems?
- How do zk and compliance co-exist?
- How do we bridge web2 to web3 while maintaining privacy?
If any of these spark your interest or you have other questions / thoughts, please discuss below!
Resources
Interested in more? Join the OpSci Discord: OpSci
Further investigation links:
Active Inference for Generative Sensemaking
Discusses cognitive systems and why they’re needed in web3, DAOs as cognitive systems and how to come to understand select actions by these entities.
Active Entity for Ontology for Science
Discusses the importance to have shared language for smart contracts and DAOs – allowing people to simulate complex behavior that might be in smart contracts through this shared language. This allows modeling of different agents and interactions.