This doc is an open invitation for feedback, on the MVP and future iterations.
Community Validations (CVs) are a community-native way to explore building reputation by validating and contributing to science openly and transparently. By working on CVs, members of scientific communities can easily contribute, get credited, and receive rewards for their contributions to science. The unified, open and decentralized infrastructure underpinning CVs ensures that contributions can build into a collective reputation over time, helping showcase both a contributor's individual work and a community's collective efforts.
Scientific publishing is broken. A lack of transparency, inadequate infrastructure and misaligned incentives hinders scientific progress. The DeSci movement is uniquely positioned to experiment with new and radical alternatives for publishing scientific research.
A flourishing scientific publishing ecosystem centers on communities. Communities create and maintain scientific knowledge (formally as in publications and journals, and informally as in shared notes or conversations), with individuals primarily, but not exclusively, driven by the desire to establish credibility. In doing so, communities generate positive externalities for the wider ecosystem in the form of high-quality scientific knowledge and useful attention allocation mechanisms. Borrowing from Brian Eno’s concept of Scenius, we assume that great discoveries are made by a healthy and flourishing ecosystem of diverse actors. In a healthy ecosystem, these actors influence and support each, generating new insights, discoveries, and solutions that could not have been generated by an isolated individual without access to new perspectives. Further, a healthy ecosystem of communities allows and encourages specialization of talents based on comparative advantages by incentivizing unique contributions and collaboration.
For communities to flourish, we need new coordination mechanisms. The existing incentive structure directing activity within the scientific ecosystem is based impact factor as its metrics, and peer-review as its curation primitive. The current paradigm allows for little room for experimentation and does not incorporate meta-scientific tools for the curation of scientific outputs. We aim to change this, by providing communities with the coordination primitives to create new, richer, and more plural mechanisms of scientific curation, validation, and exchange, within and across currently existing microcosms.
A vibrant scientific information sphere values the diverse perspectives. We need to think of scientific work as crossroads for diverse community perspectives to intersect, collide, and cross-pollinate. Science advances best when a plurality of perspectives intersect critically. By creating communications channels and models of coordination centered on scientific validation, we can foster these intersections and facilitate progress.