Society Library (Jamie Joyce) Takeaways:

• Working on epistemic mapping, mapping deliberations about complex subjects (Nuclear energy, climate change, Covid-19), decision-making models
• Ramping up integration with city councils to improve decision making
• Creating visualizations for compressing complex knowledge, open to seeing what others could do with visualizations of Society Library’s data as well
• Building methods for deconstructing arguments and mapping them out, mining claims and arguments
• These processes have applications for Decentralized Science and general public social and political spaces

 

Atoms.org (Darren Zhu) Takeaways:

• Paper publishing and grant funding are slow and have a lot of friction
• Science quality is declining, partially evidenced by the replication crisis
• More edge science should be funded, high risk high reward science that falls between the cracks of bureaucracy
• These problems can be solved with new tools and organizations centered on decentralized science
• Currently in the middle of building and could use another round of funding and more full stack developers
• Conference peer reviews may be a bigger problem than normal peer review because there is no iteration

 

Desci Labs (Philipp Koepellinger) Takeaways:

• Desci labs is focused on improving replicatability, accessibility, and incentives for scientists
• Nodeviewer tool under construction to allow scientists to build rich research objects that can be stored on peer to peer networks.  Manuscript, data, code, annotations – basically a living document with enriched media to allow deeper explanations of experiments
• Crypto integration could be used to incentivize replication and crowdfunding
• Peer review isn’t getting paid right now, it’s a donation to the publication industry which unfairly monetizes their work
• Building a professionally managed discord server soon
• Two uses for web3 are to fund fringe research and to create more accessibility for established research

 

LabDAO (Niklas Rindtorff) Takeaways:

• It may be possible to spin up mini-CRO entities in any lab and receive open source payments
• LabDAO is an organization that attempts to make this idea a reality
• Open lab protocol is being developed to allow labs to interact with each other in an automated fashion
• Currently mostly computational work but aspirations for wetlab work in the future
• Github is a good structural model for a decentralized system of cooperation

 

Smart Contract Research Forum (Eugene Leventhal) Takeaways:

• Grant funded org focused on advancing web3 research
• Open peer review project currently being defined and researched
• The project is open to any interested organizations that would like to help develop open peer review
• There’s a coordinated emerging effort to organize the desci community
• What will happen after a year of active community building?
• Anonymity in peer review needs to be looked at more closely
• Culture may be the hardest thing to change regarding science processes