How Communities Shape DeSci Projects with Jelani Clarke and Martin Etzrodt — Part Two
Did you find our latest article covering the first part of this discussion as intriguing as we did? Did you discover anything new? Well, today, you’re in for another enlightening session as we delve into the final segment of our discussion, exploring how communities can shape decentralized science projects.
Without delay, let’s dive right in.
Martin, I would like to ask you, what platform or tools do you find most effective for facilitating communication and collaboration between the communities you work with?
Martin: What’s so nice about the DeSci space is that it’s inclusive, and you have this ability of anyone with no friction to join first. And then self-select to the place that you fit in. That can be just listening. That can be contributing to something getting deep into a problem. And in terms of what platforms there are, I have two answers. One is that I think the current social media platforms like Discord, and Telegram especially, are very handy and quick and open. But at the same time, they are distorting a lot, and they are taking a lot of attention away. So I would say, the best platform we don’t have yet.
We need to have new platforms that will facilitate communication and make it discoverable what you’re excited about. This is something the DeSci space should build, and I feel we haven’t achieved this yet. There are examples like Research Gate basically for researchers. But these are not yet web3. At best, they are web 2.5. The thing that the platform of the future should have is total control in the hands of the creator of the digital goods you’re contributing. This requires things like true decentralized storage, time stamping, and unshared identities. And that’s something we have to build.
So wrong answer to your question but we still have to build the best platform that does not take the intention away but allows everyone at a level playing field to contribute. If you want to be fair, we have to build something that everyone’s equivalent in a way and fairly treated for their contributions.
Jelani: Agreed. This is a very salient point. We are yet to have a platform that fulfils a lot of the needs that DeSci is looking to build. We definitely need to build something that is composable and amenable to all participants in the space, not just from the social realm but also from the technical tooling realm. In the same way, we need shared comments, potential ideas, and data information so that we can have composable things like identity across ragged platforms such that when you provide data either on yourself or on your research, then it can be sufficed from a widely different context.
You also need things to integrate directly ideally with tools in DeSci. If you think about something like the app or app store, one of the pros of the app or app store is you don’t have to go to each app’s website to get access to the tool. You have a consolidated source where you can pull in these apps and apply them. We are in the process of developing the DeSci app store but whether we succeed or not, the point is information aggregation in a way that’s still composable with decentralization and multiple stakeholder frameworks is what we need to be able to foster the adoption by the various stakeholders whether the scientists, science couriers, people who want to sell their data or monetize their data.
Aggregation is key here. We’ve seen it in the DeFi space. We’ve seen it in other spaces. GitHub is a good example. A lot of people converge around GitHub for applications and software. We need software equivalent in DeSci.
That’s very insightful because there are existing platforms like Telegram and Discord. When you enter them, you see messages from family, friends, and everybody, and you’re bombarded with this rush of information. Most of these platforms, their social media platforms are built to keep you in their app. You just want to go in, work, and go out, so we are looking forward to seeing tools relating to DeSci and powered by everybody on the internet in a decentralized network so we don’t have to rely on servers. So it’s very interesting to have a DeSci-powered platform so people can interact, exchange ideas, and build things. So Jelani, over to you. How do you navigate and address conflicting opinions or priorities within the community?
Jelani: So I’m a very pragmatic person. I don’t address them, to be honest. I think the power of web3 is people vote with their feet. You don’t have to stick around in a place that you don’t agree with. I think DeSci is nebulous enough for individuals where if you don’t agree with a community, you can go start your community, and that’s both a power and a curse. On the one hand, you can have the freedom to work with like-minded people. On the other hand, that may stifle the speed at which we innovate because people are just moving around as they see fit.
At some point, you want concerted efforts of people towards a common cause. If we make it too nebulous, then it’s going to take us too much time to get to any particular direction. Nevertheless, for me, I think open discussion is key. If you have a different view from me in terms of how we can best move forward, then cool, do it. But DeSci allows you to track your contribution to a particular goal, whether it be submitting your code on-chain so anybody else can create or share it, or submitting your attesting to what you like or what you don’t like on the procedures. All of this can be verified on the blockchain, and web3 really is a vector of proof.
So if you can prove to me that your idea is good, then there’s nothing to debate about. So I don’t spend that much time. I foster people’s ideas to go and try new things. And then, we just sit back and observe. Then we let the outcomes and impact speak for itself.
Martin: I just like what Jelani said. I think this is exactly what we need to do. We need to be very open and inclusive to anything. The point is that we all are not understanding what is the right path to go forward so at this stage, the more experimentation happening, the better. Therefore, I think it’s important to have an opinion and not shut anyone out at this stage.
Jelani: I was in a panel yesterday, talking about DAOs and DeSci. One of the things I like to highlight is that DeSci is not monolithic. DeSci is a movement, but there are various verticals in DeSci. There are major pain points in science where it could be funding, data ownership, data management, publishing, and access. So there’s no best way to do DeSci. To agree with what Martin said, we need people to just try things. You don’t have to be combative or malicious. You don’t have to also agree. We can do our things separately and try to converge at a point to work amicably.
Excellent! It’s an open space filled with different people from different backgrounds. So we should allow people with their opinions and allow people to experiment. We should also share knowledge and learn from one another. So this question goes to both panelists. What are some of the challenges and unique opportunities that DeSci projects face in terms of community building?
Martin: Let me extend it to the concept of openness. What is really important is that we are building projects and communities that are diverse enough. The concern I have here is that many times, within those groups, they are too immature in a way. They are trying to solve problems that many generations have already tried to solve before. Two years ago, there were discoveries of the open science movement and concept in DeSci, and everyone said, ‘Yes!’
A challenge I have is that we see new DeSci projects trying to reinvent the wheel and then we have a lot of things about publishing. This problem has already been solved by now with SciHub. In a nutshell, the main challenge we have is that it’s revolving around similar problems and then those different people that are coming up with this are going through the discovery process and they don’t realize that other people are doing the same. And then, in the end, they don’t want to work together. And I really don’t like that.
Jelani: Agreed. We’ve seen this in open science actually. Martin is absolutely correct. DeSci is not a singularity. It is a product of what exists in prior, which is open science. So there have been about a million communities that exist in open science around specific tooling and applications that we can learn from in DeSci. The issue with that space is that we fall in love with things. We fall in love with missions and oftentimes we do so in a way that excludes others. We are at the detriment of collaborating with others. That is the double-edged sword of such an open space.
Yeah, I can fall in love with the Blockchain for Science telegram and only want to spend my time there. And anybody who tells me that I need to go somewhere else or that I could go somewhere else, I might not like that. That level of tribalism is a big issue. And that’s something fundamental to humans and that’s going to definitely be the baseline of resistance that we need to work out somehow.
The other thing is also coordination and governance. It’s really easy to spin up a Discord or a channel but it’s really difficult to govern or coordinate a distributed group of people. Nobody has quite cracked that code in DeSci. Oftentimes, we see platforms built in tools and we have communities in those platforms asking questions but that doesn’t necessarily push forward the mission of that particular DAO or tool. So very strong or ideal governance frameworks are something that we are going to have to tackle and that’s more of a social concept.
We need sociologists, and soft-skill sciences in the DeSci space so that we can best learn how to govern the true asset of DeSci which is not the tool but the people. That’s going to be our biggest issue moving forward as we scale. Martin has led this fantastically. He’s trying to pull people to get a solid stream of funding to help support DeSci but that’s not an easy thing to do.
That’s excellent. This issue of apathy in coordination is really high. Because as you mentioned in a distributed network because everyone is at different locations, it’s difficult. Even the issue of governance. It’s not just an issue in DeSci. I’ve observed it in different protocols. You have this issue of fewer people participating in governance. This was like a problem which led to delegation being a thing in the web3 ecosystem because a lot of people don’t just want to do the work of governance. The last question we have will go to the two speakers. What role do you see communities playing in the future of DeSci innovation?
Martin: The communities that you should focus on should be those that control the protocols, the DAOs. The ones that are building the core infrastructure in the web3 space. And convince all of them that they have to go and follow the 2% for the DeSci community movement. So that is, if 2% of the GDP goes into funding science by nation-states, you convince all the founders that they should think about some of their computers that are printing the tokens. 2% of those tokens should be put as a public goods funding effort to DeSci. If we do that, then probably we can see if we’ll find ways to distribute this funding. A lot of projects that are now building infrastructure are being adopted because founders are going to use them. This could help a lot by pushing innovation in DeSci.
Jelani: I’ll finish up by talking a bit about how we introduced DeSci. One of our key tenets here at DeSciWorld is, ‘more than the tech, more than the funding, it is the people using these tools that are actually going to usher in the changes that we are hoping to see’. This is to say that DeSci is predominantly filled with founders and builders and we need the people who are going to go out and use those tools and ideate and combine them to drive impact to achieve the changes that we want.
So, community is paramount in DeSci. Over these coming years, it’s going to be building on these communities. It’s why we took the initial step of going from the social aspect. We just need more people to leverage, to use, and to critique what is happening in the space. Sometimes we get caught in an echo chamber of builders thinking that we are going to change the world.
The more energy in the system, the more entropy in the system, the better we are going to be in the long run. So I’ll just move off with that. Thank you Daniel for this. DeSci Africa is a fantastic community. I look forward to working more closely with all of the various social groups because we are the ones that are going to vanguard the DeSci movement and we need to be working together and collaborating in pushing those globally.
Thank you so much, Jelani. Thank you, Martin, too, for your contribution. We can say that communities have a huge impact on the success of DeSci projects. You could have an amazing product. You could build something and it just ends there unless you have a community supporting you. Unless you have actual users using the application. That’s where the real growth comes from. Thank you very much to everyone joining the space today. We hope to see you next month in our next space.
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