Scoping and Feasibility Research For Decentralizing Governance in Scientific Publishing

This grant proposes researching governance frameworks for a scientific publishing protocol that is phased into open source ecosystem.

We currently have a proposal in to NSF (the National Science Foundation) for just such a feasibility study. That grant is pending so this grant would help us kickstart the process of exploratory research of how a DAO-like structure can be used to govern a blockchain based scientific research publishing protocol.

The protocol we are using as the research artifact is Frontier Registry, our publishing protocol built on the blockchain and released so far in Alpha on test net. As this protocol develops further we would like to explore responsible and ethical ways of transitioning it to user-owned aka exit-to-community.

Two Main Focus Areas

We are building Frontier Registry as research infrastructure to support global researchers in their publishing efforts and also as a way to provide more open access to published work, while still protecting authors’ rights. The UX/UI is designed as user-friendly as possible so that non-blockchain users can easily use the protocol. So one major component of the research scoping phase is determining whether user-agency in this respect is wanted or welcomed.

The second main component in this exploratory research scoping phase is to to see how we can responsibly and ethically transition to a user governance structure in this context of science. As we’ve seen thus far in the token-based voting structures of DAOs, there can be unequal weight between users’ governance rights. We feel this is highly inappropriate in the context of scientific research and peer review publishing. So we are eager to explore and experiment with other governance structures besides token-weighted voting. The aim is to provide full agency and governance to the publishing protocol users without risking concentration of power in a subset or subgroup of users.

We propose a 3 month scoping research phase to explore these components. I will keep the same team that we have assembled for our NSF grant proposal. The team comes from the startup world, an NGO, scientific research, DAO executive leadership and developer relations.

The Hows of Contributing to A DAO

We are also prepping for informal webinars focused on DAOs, blockchain and fusion energy that are structured more like AMAs (ask me anythings) than courses or formal presentations.

Informed communities are vital. And we are aiming for our FrontierDAO community members to be the most well-informed citizenry as possible about How to DAO.

This grant is also intended for more general research into different methods and strategies for DAO governance. This past year, our executive members have joined several DAOs to learn and glean best practices. We would like to develop a more bespoke DAO governance system for our community that relies more on reputation-based voting rights. Support from this grant is intended for use in that exploratory scoping phase.

LINKS waitlist for DAO AMAs https://tally.so/r/n99JV4

X.com/FrontierDAO https://FrontierDAO.xyz