I came to the meta category to gain an overall understanding of this forum, its purpose, and the intended outcome of participating here. I didn’t find much in the way of explaining this forum, except for the following post from @Rich in a separate meta thread:
I didn’t want to take away from that topic, but I do want to begin a discussion based upon this post. Consider:
I agree with this paragraph. Yet, it seems from the first part of the quote that this forum focuses only on a subset of people, ie industry/researchers or engineers/academia. Consider from the perspective of an “outsider” who has insight into the uncertain area uniting the flexibility of subjective human collaboration and the rigidity of machine rule sets:
- Why should such a person engage in discussion here?
- What safeguards are there to ensure that a participant is given full credit for an idea?
- What protections are there in place to proportionately reward the originator of an idea according to the measure of its objective impact?
- Does building a bridge between academia and industry solve the problem of sourcing people with scarce, unique insight?
To be clear, my ultimate fear would be that this place is a hub for academics/engineers/professionals to farm good ideas from people who place their trust in the brand name of Chainlink and its affiliated research institutions. In my experience, the brand name of prolific institutions does not offer the aforementioned safeguards/protections, and in my most cynical point of view, I actually think it’s the point of institutions to abuse brand name trust in exchange for disproportionate contributions compared to the rewards that contributors receive (if any at all). I think it’s crucial to understand this dynamic, because I think it hinders effective grassroots collaboration.