Community-run DeSci Fellowships focused on the production of open sourced DeSci tooling.

MuseMatrix runs six month long fellowships; helping educate, fund and coordinate builders interested in advancing decentralised science. We take a pragmatic approach focused on tangible outputs, namely open sourced DeSci tooling. We run cohorts of approximately 20 fellows (a mix of scientists, web3 developers, ZK, AI and more) who work collaboratively to build out a product. It is designed in an additive way that scientists & developers can participate whilst also having other commitments.

We are already running one cohort and have learnings to improve how we deliver it for future cohorts. See below for updates since our previous gitcoin round.

Update Since Previous #1:

Link to the previous round project for more details on the structure of the Fellowship

Thanks to your support in Round #1 we launched and completed Phase 1 of the MuseMatrix Fellowship program.

For context, the Fellowship is a six-month programme where by the end we have an economically sustainable DeSci product.

It is broken into three Phases:

Phase 1: Teaching

Phase 2: Project Scoping/User Interviews

Phase 3: Project Buildout

Cohort 1 is currently in Phase 2

Phase 1 Recap

March

We went live with applications at the end of March. It was officially launched at the DeSci London conference on 23/24 March.

April

The majority of April was spent promoting the Fellowship and we are happy to report we received almost 100 applications, far more than we expected!

May

The last week of April and the beginning of May were spent interviewing potential applicants and the cohort officially kicked off at the end of May.

June/July

Cohort 1 began with 25 amazing fellows who have now been fully DeSci-pilled! The majority (80%) had not used a wallet before nor had any prior knowledge of blockchain, web3 or DeSci.

Half of the fellows participated in person weekly at a partner office in London, while the other half were remotely connected. We had frequent syncs where the in-person cohort met the remote cohort.

The weekly sessions involved peer-to-peer learning about science, blockchain, and DeSci subtopics. See here for the curriculum with links to the Fellows presentations.

We have also kicked off the Product and Marketing working groups, covering the basics of building out a product, doing validation before actually writing code and the basics of marketing. The marketing squad promoted an open call for ideas on Twitter which was the most-viewed episode of The DeSci Mic! We will be kicking off the Developer, Business and Article writing squads next week.

Phase 2

Fellows are moving into phase 2 (as of July 15th), where they will spend 2 to 3 weeks conducting user interviews (with scientists, universities, and biotech companies) to fully scope out our main project idea (Causality Network) which is a DePIN protocol to authenticate scientific data.

Additionally, we will productise the peer-to-peer learning element to make it easier to run further cohorts (this will be built on EAS). See here for details. This will be built out over August.

Two of the fellows were keen to work on an idea they came up with by themselves to which MuseMatrix will be giving support.

**Next Steps: **

Phase 3:

Phase 3 is focused on project build out. We are focused on tangible outputs which we define as products or research papers. The first Fellowship group ends in October so this is the deadline to have a product live by.

Cohort 2:

We are also running additional an cohort (in LATAM and Africa) which started last week.

Building DeSci Products is hard!!!

Despite DeSci being three years old, there are very few live products (the bulk of the ecosystem is BioDAOs focused on funding whereas our focus is on tech products). In the entire ecosystem, there are just a handful of products that are live (most of which are in beta). DeSci products take alot of time and effort to effectively build out. This is why our Github repo is still empty. We want to make something that solves real problems in science. This required us spending the first two months educating scientists/developers about DeSci to allow for effective cross-pollination of ideas.