How Communities Shape DeSci Projects with Jelani Clarke and Martin Etzrodt — Part One
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We’ve added a new collection to our article series. This new collection involves prerecorded conversations of our Twitter spaces. We hope you’re as excited as us🥳?
Today, we’ll be discussing how communities shape decentralized science projects with Jelani Clarke, the executive lead at DeSciWorld and Business Development Lead at Aminochain, and Martin Etzrodt, the co-founder of Blockchain for Science. Because the conversation on this topic was long and interesting, we’ll be splitting the conversations into two article series. So let’s begin!
Thank you so much for joining us. Jelani, my first question is: how did you get involved in DeSci projects? What motivated you to contribute?
Jelani: It’s funny. I stumbled upon DeSci as an extension of my journey through the web3 space in DeFi. About a year or so before I got into DeSci, I was learning about decentralized finance and its goals of cutting out middlemen and, if not that, making people more custodians and stakeholders in the processes of their financial ecosystem.
A lot of the tenets and ideologies seemed to me as a no-brainer solution for issues that exist in science, right? Like instances where there are misaligned incentives or where PhDs and grad students are being taken advantage of, not necessarily directly, but as a product of the way that the scientific ecosystem operates. Patient populations often have no strong say in what happens or what kind of therapies should be developed, and there’s no conversation with them regarding the therapies directly applied to them. So, the idea of creating self-custody or self-sovereignty in wielding scientific metrics was extremely interesting to me.
I remember sitting in a lab building out a stem cell platform, culturing some stem cells, and it just struck me: Why didn’t we see any of these applications in blockchain in science? So, I googled “Blockchain in Science” and stumbled upon the first articles Google brought up, which opened up my eyes. It was my first foray into what DeSci was, so I joined the telegram group and got to learn about people working on this aspect of science. Then I stumbled upon the blockchain for science telegram group that Martin was just talking about, and that really opened my eyes because it showed me that there were a bunch of people building, or I think in the process of building potential tools that make science more holistic.
I spent a couple of months in the space just learning about what was going on and then scheduled meetings with a bunch of people just trying to see how I could best contribute. What I realized is one of the nice things about the DeSci space is that you can contribute but you can also create. It’s very much a creative space. I like to be in a more artistic space. If you have an idea or you have a potential community or group of people who are interested in that same idea, you can start up a project. You can start to build out something.
I really wanted to build out something, and I ended up meeting Joshua, who is the founder of DeSciWorld. We just hit it off and decided that while a lot of people were focused on building technologies and tools, they wanted as many people focusing on building communities. How do we actually usher in people into the space who are eventually using those tools? That was a huge vacuum that existed in the DeSci space, so we decided to take on the more social mission of bringing people in and aggregating information about the variety of communities and projects that existed in the space.
We’ve incorporated a more technical framework into DeSciWorld, so there are tools that are compulsory to learn, but it all stems from the idea that we need to aggregate information, distill it, and disseminate it in a way to help grow communities. That’s the beginning of my journey.
That’s interesting. I’m a big fan of DeSciWorld, and something I’ve been very interested in is the weekly Twitter Spaces that happen because it’s a way to see new projects in the space, and you get to see that there are lots of people building in different places. Today, people are working on clinical data. Tomorrow, you’re seeing a project like WaterDAO. The next day, you’re seeing Datalake. It’s an avenue to spotlight these projects that might not have the popularity that others have and to learn about new projects and see what they are all about. I really appreciate that, Jelani. I appreciate the work you guys do there. So, Martin, how do you see the role of individuals reshaping the direction of DeSci initiatives?
Martin: Yes, I have been observing this, and I sometimes feel FOMO being quite on the sidelines. I see so many ideas and projects, and people say, “Let’s build this,” and so on. I’m like the commissary of all those new projects, and I’m looking at them and what I see is, in terms of individuals, people like Jelani, myself, and at least a third of the people we see in the Telegram channel actually have an academic background, and they either just left or are still in the process of finishing their studies, and they are driving projects by either joining them or starting their own.
So, I’d say that at the same time, you have a lot of people from outside the space who have backgrounds maybe in economics and are trying to build a startup. So yeah, there are different traits. It’s definitely that DAOs are now places where you find aggregation, obviously, right? Some are founders who are creating new DAOs or social platforms. And then you have people who are joining these and sticking around there. So yeah, that’s how I observe the dynamics in the space revolving.
Jelani: If I can jump on this, one of the coolest things that I appreciate the most in the space is it’s a melting pot. The DeSci space, especially the Blockchain for Science group and all the other communities, is really a melting pot for people from a variety of different backgrounds both within and outside science to congregate. In the traditional space, it goes into very specific and highly concentrated communities. DeSci opens that up so you can have a scientist, like a neuroimmunologist like myself, working with Martin with his background and someone who is a bioethicist and artist all coming together to push forward a particular mission.
Then I think it’s that rich landscape or Brainscape that is really one of the quintessential value propositions and strengths that DeScI has. We do have challenges and certain things that are a little bit more difficult in DeSci that stem from governance and how you coordinate a vast amount of people. But fundamentally, the ability to have multi-disciplinary approaches and conversations and ideas collide and give rise to new things is the strongest thing. And science has shown that when you have a multidisciplinary team, it’s a lot more effective in terms of driving innovation than a non-multidisciplinary team.
Thanks for that contribution Jelani. So, going back to you, Jelani, you’ve been in DeSciWorld. DeSciWorld is one of the pioneers in the social aspect, trying to bring people together and onboard them properly and have that interaction. I would ask, what challenges have you encountered in integrating community perspectives into DeSci initiatives?
Jelani: The challenges have definitely changed over the last two years. I think early on, the biggest challenge was that DeSci was much more conceptual than it was pragmatic. There were a lot of ideas floating around, and there weren’t many concrete examples of what kind of use cases and how effective those use cases are. As the space has matured, we’ve had tools and platforms that start to be usable by scientists, whether that be IP NFT frameworks that provide alternative sources of funding to specific levels of science or basic fundamental biology or science tooling like Clex or labDAO or DeSci Nodes.
Now that we have those, this is something we can actually present to scientists in particular and say, ‘Hey, we have these novel tools that can make your life easier in a variety of different verticals. Would you be keen on using them? Or maybe you should learn more about the ecosystems that are developing these?’ So at the beginning, it was trying to sell a dream with no substance. Now, it’s trying to convince people that there are better ways to operate.
Scientists are extremely stubborn by nature. We are skeptical. We ask questions. We really want to drill down. And that’s what makes good science, but it could sometimes stifle our willingness to try new things. So if we are talking about scientific communities, they still need a level of validation, and they want to vet what we have. And we really don’t have the history to highlight or prove that we are effective.
Outside of the scientists, they are actually a lot easier because they are more dreamers. So they don’t necessarily need the level of criteria or screening in the actual methodology. They love the vision more. So if you want to talk to a patient group that wants to advocate for research who is involved with their particular clinical diagnosis, it’s easy for them because it affects their lives on so many levels. In those cases, they are looking for the endgame while scientists want to find the path to the endgame. That changes how we onboard more people.
But a really good metric that I’ve seen that excites me about where we are going and how successful we’ve been is how there has been a year-by-year increase in the number of people that sign up for the DeSci summit. That shows that more people are getting interested in DeSci. So we just need to keep talking about it so more people will keep coming in.
Beautiful. I agree with you. Earlier on, a lot of things were proof of concepts. People were just asking, ‘How does DeSci work?’ As of then, a couple of projects were just focused on funding research in specific domains. It didn’t have a wide range. So we have this problem with people who are not in that field having issues understanding what it’s all about. But so far, we’ve seen a couple of projects trying to build tools. There’s DeSci Labs building computational tools for molecular structures. There’s also WaterDAO building a water-based platform. Things are becoming more physical.
Remember, this is not the end of the conversation. We’ll be moving on to the next questions in our next series. However, you can listen to the entire recording here.
