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DeSci Landscape Analysis: Crowdfunding Effects on Project Development
Recorded: June 22, 2023 Duration: 1:04:58Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening.
Nice to see you here.
Hey, Umar.
How are you doing?
Yes.
Hey.
Hello, GM.
GM, GM.
GM, Umar.
Were you able to publish from the Bitcoin account?
Yeah, I think they retweeted it this morning.
Awesome.
Awesome.
So let's wait a couple of minutes.
Cool.
How are you all doing?
How are you all doing?
I'm doing great.
Enjoying a rainy day here in Santiago.
It never rains, so I'm very happy for that.
We need water.
Nice.
It's stormy over here.
We just got great clouds up in Long Island, but I think we might be getting some rain soon,
too.
I miss the sun, though.
We get plenty of rain.
I miss the sun.
Yeah.
But overall, you're doing okay, right?
All as well.
Super busy as always, but, you know, that's just how it goes.
Awesome.
Hey, guys, how are you doing?
It's raining in Santiago, Pancho.
Yes, finally, finally, we needed this.
We needed this so badly.
Yes, we are having like a very, very important water crisis here in Montevideo.
We are running out of potable water in any time soon.
Yeah, same issue here in Santiago.
I mean, last year we finally had a good season, but this year I think this is the first important
rain of the year, and like 10 years ago we had these kind of rains in April, April, May,
and all over the winter.
And now it's almost July, and this is our first rain, so everyone is worried about water supply.
Yeah.
Now we are taking water from the Rio de la Plata River, so that it's almost not potable.
It's insane.
It's the worst drought of the history here, of the history.
Same here.
Same here.
It's terrible.
Yeah.
Everyone, I just retweeted the link, and I put a message on the Gitcoin D site community,
but if any of you have any other way to get to an audience, because the sooner we start,
the better.
Yeah.
I just retweeted it again from my personal account, and sorry to hear about the drought.
That sounds really tough.
Glad it's finally raining though.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Hope you guys get more.
Welcome to a few new folks who have joined.
We're just giving a couple more minutes for a few other folks to join in, and then we'll dive in.
We're just giving a couple more minutes for a few other folks to join in, and then we'll
go to the next one.
All right.
Well, I think we can dive in.
For anyone who hasn't yet taken a look, the topic of this conversation will be the first
report from the DSI landscape analysis, where we were focused on looking at DSI projects in
Gitcoin round 15 back in September of 2022.
That report is pinned up above at the top of this space for anyone who might want to check it out.
And we'll be kind of chatting through some of the different graphs, findings, interesting points, and also it can be a space for broader conversation, both about DSI and about what different kind of reflective recaps like this can do for other emerging ecosystems and landscapes, especially in the public goods sector.
And we have some folks from Gitcoin here as well to help answer some of those questions and shed light from their perspective.
To kind of kick it off, a little bit of background on myself.
I'm part of TalentDAO, which was one of the two partners collaborating in this report and kind of the survey and analyzing all of the data.
And we're really focused on looking at what the future of decentralized work can look like, both from like an intellectual research perspective and technological tooling as well, especially from like a publication platform perspective.
I personally have background in neuroscience and have been working in Web3 for the past handful of years.
So I'll let some of the other folks up here introduce themselves as well.
Hey, Erin.
Pancho here.
Thank you very much for the introduction.
And I'm also part of TalentDAO.
I've been there for a year and a half, but overall I've been involved in the Web3 ecosystem for three years.
And I have a background in anthropology, but now I'm I'm pivoting towards systems analysis.
So I'm seeing much more numbers than I thought I will ever will in my life.
But I am enjoying that process.
And in, yeah, in TalentDAO, we've also been studying other institutions, DAOs from the organizational side.
And doing this design report was a very interesting opportunity to try to see how the ecosystem grows from the beginning, because let's let's remember that design is very new.
But before diving into that, I would like to pass the mic to Caro.
She's a little bit sick.
So Caro, if you can speak.
Yes.
Good afternoon.
Yeah, I'm kind of sick.
Getting out of an important flu.
So sorry about my voice.
My name is Carolina and I am a marine biologist.
I work in this world for more than a year now.
And we were having this question about how is the design space, how we can contribute with the landscape analysis of the design ecosystem and for the design community and also for other people that it's on Web3, right, including investors.
So we had this question and it was interesting because we gathered with Erin and Pancho, a few guys, and that's why we are here.
So I'm very excited to show our results to the people and pretty much excited to hear what the audience has to say and what they are expecting from this, because we have like future plans.
So all along this space, we are going to talk about them.
Hi, I'm Umar.
I'm from Gitcoin.
I've been there for a little bit over a year.
A long time, Desai fan, supporter, and data nerd.
So, you know, when Pancho reached out saying that they were him, Caro and Aaron were starting this initiative to look at some Desai grantees at Gitcoin and get some updates from them.
I was so excited and thrilled.
One of the things I really love about this community is that anyone can decide they want to do something and then do it.
And one of the hard things, honestly, is seeing that people follow through on that and actually execute.
So it was wonderful to see y'all actually execute, to survey all these Desai grantees, to complete an analysis, and to publish it.
It was just really awesome.
And I have a lot of learnings from your report, as well as some questions.
So I'm looking forward to diving in and hearing more about it from y'all.
Yes, he was a fantastic support and just making sure we had all of the data from kind of Gitcoin's public or platform side of things to be able to tie some of the findings that we were looking at from a survey to all these different projects together.
So huge thank you to Gitcoin and your ongoing support and just continuing to keep the ecosystem moving forward and sharing the knowledge to help all the projects involved.
So if you all agree, we can start just like telling you guys that.
So as I told you, we had questions about how was the Desai ecosystem and we wanted to know this.
This is the first report and it's now focused on the past Gitcoin grantees.
But the idea is to explore it and have more information in the upcoming weeks.
So, but with the first, we had questions about how was the structure?
How was the degree of maturity of this space?
We had questions about demographics, gender, age distribution of the participants, and the degree of the maturity of the project.
So, as you all know, in September 2022, Gitcoin held a Desai feature case run, was the first in the history, the GR15, that resulted in more than 500k being allocated to more than 80 projects in the ecosystem.
So, in this sense, we came up with a question about how, about the importance of crowdfunding and the impact that it can have in the Desai organizations and the existing development, right?
So, we wanted to explore what were these projects and what they achieved using the funds from Gitcoin.
So, what we did, we created a survey and we sent it to the 82 GR15 Gitcoin grantees.
The survey had 21 questions that were about, they were about the project purpose, the associations, how was the team compositions in terms of age, gender, and also the geographical locations of the, of the teams.
And we also asked open questions, you know, because we wanted to know about the barriers that people feel they face to grow in Desai and to expand, right?
And finally, we want to know what they accomplished thanks to the GR15 run.
So, we also asked Gitcoin for information about the total funds allocated to the grantees.
And as Erin said, but I want to say it again, I want to take the chance to thank Gitcoin and especially Umar here that is present for facilitating us the data.
So, I think that we can go on, maybe Pancho or Erin can start explaining how we did the analysis using all the data that we gathered.
Sure. Thank you, Karo.
Erin, before I start digging into the qualitative side of the survey, do you have anything else for the introduction of the...
I don't think we're missing anything.
Do you?
No, I think in terms of some of the more quantitative side of the analysis, it's fairly straightforward.
For some of the questions, we had a handful of categories, which we'll kind of dive into.
But for some of the more open-ended ones, we grouped those into categories.
And Pancho, if you want to dive into that, that might be helpful context.
Yeah, thank you.
So, in any survey, you have things that you can count, and you have scales and all that, but we also had open questions.
And fortunately, we had experience working with this kind of data before.
So, yeah, we had different categories.
And if you look into the mirror publication, you'll see a table with the different questions and the different themes that we found from each question.
So, that's how we identify with more, in a profound way, what these projects are actually doing.
Because if a project says, hey, you know, I published something, or I'm developing new tools, that's great.
But you don't have the context, and it's hard to do that in a survey.
So, these open questions allowed us to understand more of the context of what each project is doing.
And so, we put those categories to understand what's the common ground for all these 82 projects.
So, I'm not going to mention each and every one of those themes, but you can see those in the publication.
So, I invite you to read the whole article.
It's not a long format read.
But the important thing here is that, at least from a discussion point of view, we see that many, many projects actually were able to use the Gitcoin funds to hire people to get new talent for their projects.
And to help finish some publications they had, either on a journal or maybe just for an article.
And also to do workshops and in real life events.
So, those are one of the things that, when we saw, when we tried to understand the impact that these funds may have for these different projects.
We understand that, even though for some projects it's not that much money, for some of them it is.
But you can do very meaningful stuff with the funds that they receive from the Gitcoin.
So, we also have some charts about the quantitative data.
And I know that Erin worked on those.
So, want to go with that, Erin?
Yeah.
So, just kind of to lay the ground a little bit as well.
Projects were classified into a couple of different categories.
Some of which we provided some broad classification, which was community building, research, funding, and technical infrastructure.
And then from that, projects were also able to share what they accomplished.
And we then classified that into publications, partnerships, educational efforts, participation in events, new implementations and updates, and ship products and services.
And we found that there was some connection between the projects that were more focused on technical infrastructure with some of those different ship products and new implementations, which we would hope to see and expect.
One thing that I found particularly interesting throughout this, like Pancho mentioned, many projects were able to accomplish a large amount of their proposed goals from their project proposal that they submitted on Gitcoin without massive amounts of funding.
A lot of projects only got a few hundred dollars or in the low thousands, and they were still able to have profound impact in terms of moving their project forward.
So, different opportunities, such as what Gitcoin can provide by kind of joining people together around a centralized goal, such as CSI and moving that ecosystem forward, can have really meaningful progress across both the technical side or funding research, as well as some of the more kind of people, community-oriented side.
And by grouping efforts together and having these just kind of shared Twitter spaces and conversations and support across the ecosystem, in my personal opinion, I think that really helped lead to a lot more excitement in this space.
And that was some of the initial kind of desire for investigating this as well, because DSI has seen a bit of kind of an uptick in energy and new people entering kind of post or starting from this Gitcoin round and just some of the excitement that came with that.
So, yeah, so kind of the different charts that are pinned above, we'll be able to better explain kind of what different accomplishments were achieved across some of these different categories.
But broadly, the biggest focuses were on community-building and research, which I think is aligned especially with an early-stage science-focused industry.
As we continue moving down the report, we also see that there's a big opportunity for different needs and supports for projects across varying levels of kind of their project maturity or how much they were able to accomplish since kind of receiving this funding
or completing participation in that Gitcoin round, through which a lot of projects who accomplished 70% of their goals or less, really were looking for attraction.
So, community expansion and engagement, and that can be a great way to kind of continue expanding the DSI ecosystem and inviting new people in.
And then as projects continue to accomplish more of their goals, scoring 8 or 9 out of 10, meaning 10 out of 10 or more than everything they were hoping to accomplish based on their proposal,
there is more need for business model and market fit support.
So, some more of the business professional talent would be really helpful for some of those maybe slightly more established or mature DSI projects.
And then projects who accomplished all of their proposed goals were really looking for funding.
And I think that showcases a need across the ecosystem, both for more crowdfunding opportunities, as well as institutional investors to really be able to support taking DSI and DSI opportunities to that next level.
So, I'll pause there for any other folks to happen, or if any people have questions, feel free to raise your hand to become a speaker, and we can take those throughout this conversation as well.
I've definitely got...
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead, Mancha.
Go ahead.
Omar, did you have a question?
Yes.
Omar.
So, this was a part of the report that really grabbed my attention.
It's really, really interesting to know that the top two problems projects face are, one, funding, and two, attraction.
Funding, I guess, of course, is sort of to be expected, that DSI has a funding problem, and that's where Gitcoin is definitely trying to help as much as we can.
And that first round was, of course, huge, because there was just so much momentum behind it, so much interest from various different matching partners, from Vitalik to Juan Benet to Springer Nature, Alchemix, all coming in to support DSI in the round.
And that was amazing to see, that a lot of that funding is growing.
But one of the other sort of questions for me around this is like, what were you all able to learn around how many other funding sources projects have?
And then, I also have a question about attraction, because I think that's also an interesting one that I've had some cool conversations with folks about before, but still remains sort of a, well, still remains sort of an open question to me in terms of how do we increase attraction?
But I guess just that first question, like, what is the overall DSI funding landscape look like with Gitcoin and also just outside of it?
Yeah, so we asked projects if they had received any other funding, and 22 out of the 41 projects who responded, so almost half, indicated that they had received other funding, but that varied widely.
Some of them indicated that they had received funding through a previous Gitcoin round.
Others have said it might be, like, very small amounts, too.
Some have gotten quite large grants.
So it was kind of hard to exactly classify, because we didn't, we left that to be a fairly open-ended question that people could respond to as they saw fit.
And some provided a beautiful breakdown of lots of different funding that they received, and all the different sources.
Other ones were just, like, grants from multiple DAOs.
So we were able to get some sense of that, but not in as detailed of a way to be able to really make conclusive findings from that, which is definitely something that was indicated as a desire from the community of what future DSI investigations and landscape analysis might focus on,
which is where is funding coming from, which is where is funding coming from, and maybe different tips or recommendations, or even just seeing how successful projects are getting funding to move forward.
Just so the projects that might be newer could kind of have a roadmap or a case study to look at.
I guess, I guess, to answer your question, it really varied from a couple hundred dollars to proper VC investment.
Yeah, and that's really great for us to know, because, I mean, I could coin that tells us that there's still an unmet need for DSI funding, that we still need to greatly increase it.
And that's very intuitive and makes a lot of sense, and also having that backed up with some hard data is really great for us when we go out and we try to do some fundraising to attract more people into DSI and say, like, this is a space that's making moves, this is a space that's accomplishing things, and it's a space that still needs more funding.
Absolutely. I will also just add that a lot of the different projects who responded to this question indicated more grant funding. VC kind of investment funding was pretty rare in these responses.
So, very much still fitting under, like, a heavy public goods, non-profit vibe for a lot of these different projects, or purely kind of explicitly saying just like philanthropic grants.
So, Gitcoin fits perfectly into that equation.
I will also add that many of these projects are early stage.
Like, DSI, in general, it's a very new movement, but when I was looking into what some projects have achieved or are trying to achieve, they said, well, we don't even have an MVP.
Like, we are just beginning to design our product or the way we work as an organization.
So, it's very hard to see, like, VC funding or any meaningful partnership that can give you any additional funding if you are at that very, very early stage where when you are just deciding what do you want to do, who you are, you know?
So, we believe that the more this space matures, then hopefully we can see a more diverse landscape for funding that, of course, Gitcoin is a big part of this, but hopefully we don't have to depend 100% on you guys and we can become more independent.
I wanted to add that the idea behind it is that we want to leverage science as a public good.
So, everyone who wants to support directly any project can do it using a platform, a crowdfunding platform.
So, Gitcoin is one of it and it's great and I hope that it can gather more funds for the DSI space for the next rounds.
But I'm pretty sure that there will be other platforms where people would be able to support directly the DSI project, which it's the idea of decentralized science, right?
It's that all the society can directly show support to the scientists and the project.
So, it's pretty nice.
That's a very good point, Caro.
And actually, I just remembered something that relates to Omar's question, that some of the DSI projects are actually trying to build public goods, not a business.
Some are saying that they are lacking market feed or trying to build a business, which is okay.
But I think that the funding model or the way you have a sustainable treasury is very different from a DAO that is trying to be a public good versus an institution that is trying to sell something.
And I see, this is my personal perspective, but I saw that there's some confusion with some projects that they still do not define it.
Like, are we doing research or are we building a business or are we doing both?
I think that some projects still don't have that clear.
Hey, everyone.
Just wanted to chime in and tell you all that you've done a fantastic job of writing this report.
And clearly, there are very many notable insights that have emerged.
And, you know, on that topic, I wanted to, since we're talking about funding, I really wanted to understand how did the funding come about for the inaugural DSI round?
Because I think I heard somebody mention, you know, other DAOs, I guess, like Alchemix and whatnot, they funded it.
And I guess, I mean, that's still kind of primarily, quote-unquote, top-down funding, right?
These institutions already exist, and they're, for some, whatever incentive they have, they've decided to fund this.
And I just want to understand that so that we can also balance it with, like, a bottom-up funding kind of thing.
That's kind of what brings me here.
And yeah, I would like to start there.
If you could shed some light on that.
Thanks.
I can take this one, I think.
A lot of the reason the organizations...
Well, I guess to the first part of your question, who funded the round?
We received $500,000 in matching funding from some very large partners.
The first partner that really came in was Vitalik Buterin, who really wanted to support the DSI ecosystem.
One of the reasons we see people like Vitalik join is because they support a movement, but they are incredibly busy.
And they don't have the time to go through each project and say, which ones deserve funding and which ones don't.
So the quadratic funding mechanism really lets the community make the decision in a bottoms-up way to allocate and decide where the funding goes.
And so after Vitalik came in, then we started seeing a lot of other funders come in, like Kwan Binet from Filecoin and Protocol Labs, like Springer Nature, like Alchemix.
And across the board, all of these organizations are interested in supporting DSI as a movement and letting the community decide where does the funding go.
And I guess, like, you know, one of the other things that I just want to mention here is that fundraising was really heavily driven also by a community effort.
There were just people in the DSI ecosystem who wanted to see a DSI round happen and who organized, we organized ourselves to make it happen.
And so there were individuals like Azeem at Gitcoin who was helping organize a lot of the fundraising.
But then there were also people like Vincent who were coming in from Molecule saying, you know, I want to help fundraise for this round and ended up being huge for closing a lot of these sponsors.
And then, of course, the community comes in and they add even more funding on top of that and determine where the matching funding goes.
A lot of times in this particular DSI round, a $1 donation was matched by $25, $30 or more from the matching fund.
That's incredible what happened, you know, in that kind of way that you described.
And so, I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off if you had something more to say, but what I wanted to tie my question off with was basically, it sounds like then it was almost like an impetus to just, like you said, you know, just push the movement.
Let's see what happens.
And, I mean, in the real world, I guess people might get some kind of tax write-off or something of that nature.
Nothing like that happens here, right?
I mean, it really was altruistic, I suppose.
Is that right?
Yeah, definitely.
Tax write-offs is something people have been interested in, but we aren't able to currently provide because we don't have a U.S. entity.
That's a 501c3 that people can write off to.
As a DAO, you know, we're very decentralized.
And so we don't have that sort of legal entity in the United States to provide for tax write-offs.
It's not, I would not say it's purely altruistic, though.
As much as it is altruistic, a lot of these organizations, a lot of these individuals also benefit from the DeSci ecosystem continuing to grow and continuing to succeed.
You know, Filecoin directly benefits because they provide this data infrastructure layer that would see a lot of use if it became the new home of science on the Internet.
The Vitalik benefits, right, if Ethereum and blockchain become a hub for academic research and if a lot of academics increasingly enter the space.
So it is altruistic, but it's also because there's a really tangible benefit to the growth of the DeSci ecosystem for them.
And, you know, one of the hard things, though, is that sometimes it can be easy to start something and hard to keep it going.
You know, we had this first round.
There was a lot of energy behind DeSci.
We got a 500K matching pool.
We had a second round in the depths of a bear market, and we saw less turnout for matching partners.
Instead of a 500K round, we had an 85K round.
And this was still a significant amount of funding for a lot of projects to be able to raise.
But it's not nearly what we were seeing before.
And one of the things that's going to help us the most to keep this going is showing people results, showing people there are things happening.
There are projects accomplishing real, meaningful, tangible things, and that we have data to support what they're accomplishing.
And so, like, this analysis, I cannot speak to how much it drives that forward.
Yeah, definitely.
And to your point, I think maybe even just articulating how it's all even downstream connected indirectly, you know, that it's all going to feed back into the ecosystem might even be helpful in marketing DeSci.
And I know this is not really about funding for the next round, but I think we have a lot of cool ideas we can discuss.
Anyways, great talk, great article.
I look forward to what we can do together.
Hi, everybody.
I would like to know if it's possible to react to what you, Marce said.
Yeah, feel free to hop in.
This is a joint convo.
So we'll keep moving it forward.
We do have a couple more pieces of the report that we just want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to kind of dive into.
But definitely share it, Kevin.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Well, about, you know, the aspect that a lot of projects don't know if they are for profits or for open source.
I think this is like a very important point for the whole DeSci community and something that I think every project should really think about this question.
Because there is a kind of two tendencies, you know, between going open source and really sharing everything, the data and all the research and going with, so with for profits, you know, and having intellectual property.
So I think this is the main issue right now for DeSci.
And if we have, you know, a protocol that enables people to share their research and at the same time being paid for it, I think this is what blockchain can provide to a community, you know, to the world DeSci ecosystem and to humanity is to have a decentralized protocol that enables people to share the research, but at the same time to be paid for it.
And when we have this, I think it will definitely have a huge impact, you know, completely.
Yeah.
There are a lot of incredible projects that were included in this Bitcoin round that are working towards building out a lot of that infrastructure and solving for a lot of those different needs, kind of claiming different portions of that whole opportunity that you just shared about.
But I think that most people on this call fully, fully, fully support what you just shared.
Um, Pancho, I wanted to see if you could share some of your thoughts on Umair at the beginning was talking about how the need for attraction and just getting more people into some of these projects is an interesting finding from this as well.
And I know you focus some of your efforts on kind of breaking down what attraction meant and kind of classifying the different broad needs that these projects had where were there any additional findings or just things that popped out to you when diving into that portion of it.
I'm not sure if we've lost you.
Can others hear him talking or hear me?
I can hear you.
I can't hear Pancho.
Okay.
All right.
Pancho, if you can hear us, feel free to pop in at any point to kind of dive into the need for attraction from.
Different projects, um, otherwise we can keep kind of driving forward.
I guess one thing that I, um, it looks like he might have lost connection.
One thing that I found interesting throughout looking at this data was a lot of the projects who were focused on community building also were focused on some other type of kind of space.
That was adjacently connected and wasn't included in our predefined kind of categories to focus in.
So that could include education.
That could include onboarding.
That could include, um, just kind of other people related things.
And a lot of projects who were focused on community building, um, also were focused on either technical infrastructure research or funding, whereas some of the other projects might only be focused in one of those areas.
So as a whole, tying in the people, the community portion to all these projects, um, is pretty central to what they're all doing, which might explain a need for more traction.
And just that that's more prioritized in the D-Site ecosystem, possibly compared to traditional science spaces or other spaces as well.
So, um, um, all right, it looks like, yeah, hopefully we can get him back up here.
Okay.
Perfect.
Sorry.
This is the third time that I get drugged by Twitter.
Twitter hates me.
Um, yeah, for some reason I could not push the button, um, Erin, I, yeah, I just want to, uh, answer your question about, uh, well, it's actually a question about the attraction and what we found about that.
So from the many questions that we have, we ask about the barriers that any single project could have.
And one of the main topics was attraction.
And what does attraction mean is basically that people get interest into that project, uh, from two sides.
I will say one is to attract talent in our case, scientists that actually join our, our teams and start doing research, but also people who get interested in what we're doing.
Um, there's, we know that this, uh, is diverse.
We have people working on medicine, drug development, um, and in conservation, we have social sciences.
We have many different areas where, where people can join and, and contribute.
But what it seems like that so far people do not understand what DeFi is.
And that's true for Web3 insiders, people who already own a Web3 wallet and they know what DeFi is and Bitcoin and Ethereum, but they still don't get what DeFi, what's the point of DeFi.
But on the other hand, it's hard, it's even harder to onboard people who are outside the Web3 ecosystem.
We found that there are many, many people who are skeptical or unfamiliar with Web3.
They think that this is a scam or it's too complicated that the, the distributed ledger technology is not necessary for, for science.
And, and, and that may be partly true that I don't think that you need to be like fully Web3 or fully blockchain to do science in a decentralized way.
It's not just about the technology.
It's also about the incentives and the way you structure your team.
But, uh, but also it is true that many, many people do not trust us.
They say, oh, you're DeFi, oh, you're, you're, you're in the blockchain industry.
So you're trying to sell me something.
You're trying to sell a token and NFT and that's a scam.
Of course, that is true for DeFi or arts or any other field in the Web3 ecosystem.
But that is definitely something that is a big barrier for DeFi adoption in general.
I will also say that, uh, not everything is bad.
When we ask about what projects accomplished in the last round, we saw that many people use the publications, the partnerships, and the educational efforts to try to reach a new audience and tell them like, hey, this is what we're doing.
This is what we have achieved.
This, you don't need to be super techie or, or have a huge amount of experience in Web3.
You just need to basically understand or work.
And if you want to invest, collaborate, or, or be part of the intellectual property that we are trying to develop here, here's the way we do that.
And we still have a long way to go in terms of usability, like how we make people understand and use what we are building here.
So better documentation, better user experience, and all that.
But considering that we have been around for just a couple of years, I think that we are doing a good job here.
We have many barriers, not just money, attraction is a big part of it, but that's why we are here.
I mean, this team, the design landscape analysis team, we are here because we understand that there's a need for other people to see results.
And this is just the exploratory phase.
We are just exploring what projects in general are doing, but moving forward on the next phase that we still have to design and deploy.
But our mission is to put that into numbers and into, in a way that people understand what this is and how we can impact the scientific landscape in general.
That sounds very good, Pancho.
I would like to add another result that were very interesting from our report.
It has to do with the demographics of this site, right?
Because we found out that in general, we still see the gender bias, the same gender bias we see in Web3 and also in traditional science.
But it's interesting that this bias is smaller than they observed in the Web3 space in general.
And so we have room to improvement there.
But also what is interesting is the age distribution, right?
Because we've seen that project leaders range in age from 19 to 70 years old.
This is a very broad distribution.
And it's very interesting because we have a lot of people with different ages interacting together and working together in living this project.
So as far as I know, when the projects are more diverse in terms of gender and in terms of ages, they are more rich, right?
So I think that this is like a nice and stable foundation for the site to expand and grow and to deliver us a lot of interesting products and projects.
Yes, Karo, that's very true.
And I will double that.
I will say that even though we see that the gender and age gap is still present, it's good to see that there are more women present in this ecosystem.
And just to tell a personal experience, since I'm working in design and in DAOs in general, every major project that I've been involved with has a woman with a leader role.
So I've never been in a full man team.
So that is something that I never saw before when I was studying or in a traditional company.
So that's great.
That's great to see that difference here.
We have like 10 minutes and I would just like to mention some final stuff from my side.
And one of the things that we found is that even though this is an open collaborative ecosystem, at least in paper, many projects see that there's not enough cross collaboration.
It is not that there's a barrier there, but it seems like every project is working in a silo.
So the call here is to open up and try to share the knowledge, try to share what you're doing, how you achieve different stuff.
If you think there's a tool that works, sorry, if there's a tool that works for your organization, share that.
Say that, hey, this is the way we work.
This is useful for us or no, this didn't work at all.
So in this early stage of the DISA ecosystem, I will say that we need to learn from each other, cross collaborate and basically work in the open.
Because as Kevin was mentioning, some, I mean, the idea here is to work in the open and maybe not all the teams will be open source, but for those who are or are intending to be, then work in the open.
Don't try to, I'm not saying hide anything, but if you find anything cool, share it, share it, make it public and we can all celebrate that.
And that's all from my side.
If Erin and Carol want to share anything else or if anyone has another question.
Yeah, I'll just pop in and reinforce that half of the projects who replied to the survey shared resources or information that they thought could be useful to the broader ecosystem.
So projects and people in this space are excited and willing to help collaborate with others, share what they've learned and kind of lift all boats as they keep rising up as well.
Which personally, I'm excited to be in this space, just being surrounded by those types of people and leaders.
With that said, some of the biggest areas that folks indicated they had interest in there being further analysis across the D-Site ecosystem is on open collaboration and partnerships.
Funding, which we talked a bit about before, demographics and representation, which we started to dive into a bit in this analysis.
Clear descriptions of what projects are doing exactly.
And then I think that also ties into a bit of just kind of starting to classify the D-Site ecosystem.
As it keeps evolving further and new projects come into the space, as well as impact.
So tying back to the very beginning of this conversation of as projects keep moving along, making sure that that impact is documented.
So other folks who might just be hearing about this space for the first time or different initiatives in this space, they can get excited about it and just build that credibility a bit.
So if anyone tuning in is doing any type of work in those types of spaces or have any resources to share there, there's an appetite for that, as well as skill sets all across the board from kind of a people or business side of things to technical and research as well.
So we've mentioned this throughout this conversation, and I know it's been mentioned many other places too, but the D-Site ecosystem is still emerging and continuing to grow.
So there's a ton of opportunity.
As we have a couple more minutes here, I would love to just make sure everyone feels invited to turn their mic on and ask any questions or share any other thoughts that they might have throughout this conversation too.
Can I do a couple shout outs?
Absolutely.
All right, so first, shout out to, on the topic of resources, one resource that I use a lot is D-Site World.
There's an amazing dashboard that shows you all of the different organizations in D-Site, lets you filter based on the type of organization you're looking for and what they're working on, whether it's research or infrastructure or something else.
So shout out to D-Site World and Kero and Pancho and the whole team there.
Shout out also TalentDAO that Aaron is from, which is an amazing community that's doing some really, really cool research like this analysis and others and open sourcing all of it.
So definitely go check them out as well.
And then I'll do one more shout out, which is, I see Shadi in the audience.
And Dr. Eldamati is one of the absolute titans of D-Site industry.
In addition to being someone who is one of those great people connectors and hosting gatherings and organizations like D-Site Denver for people to meet and really honestly helping the D-Site ecosystem kick off and take off, is a founder and working on some really cool projects like Opsi and Holonym that are making it so that there's a data commons for scientists to share their work.
And so that there's these safe credentialing systems that allow you to keep your identity private and also verify that you are legit.
So shout out to Shadi as well and the great work they're doing over at Opsi.
And then I guess I'll just do one final shout out, which is the GR15 round had some amazing projects, including Opsi, TalentDAO, the Science Commons Initiative, Nine LivesDAO, Web3 Women in Science, and a lot of other great, great projects.
So definitely go check out who the projects were in this round and learn more about what they're doing.
And if D-Site is something that interests you and you're here, just get involved.
And a perfect example of how to get involved is actually what Aaron, Caro, and Pancho did here.
They saw something missing.
They decided they wanted to do it and they did it.
So hats off to you all.
Hats off also to GetCoin, allowing all of this to happen and support all the projects in the first place.
And Umar, your ongoing support has been absolutely amazing for the entire ecosystem and then this initiative as well.
Hey guys, on the, you know, since we're wrapping things up, I would just like to say that I think there are ways for us to continue funding D-Site in ways that may not be readily apparent at this time.
But this new sector in DeFi is growing and at some point I would definitely like for all of us to kind of get acquainted with it, if not at the very deep technical level, at least a superficial level.
And I know that Dr. Aldamati is also fairly aware of this new sector as well, so maybe we could do that at some point.
But otherwise, keep it up.
Can I ask, what's next for you all?
I know you sort of teased that there's a stage two to this, and I'm super curious.
I have to take this one.
The idea here is that, as a project, we want to understand in general what D-Site is and what is happening in D-Site.
Hopefully, in the future, we can even measure impact.
But like I said, this first report is an exploratory phase where we are understanding what is going on and asking for feedback about what these different projects would like us to do research about.
Do they really need more information about funding, resources, and all that?
And today, we have discussed the findings.
So, moving forward, we need to address the needs that people said that they would like to see in a future report.
And one of those is clear understanding of what each project is doing.
That alone is a huge task because we need to not only do a survey, but to observe and to ask personally what each project is doing, how they're doing that, what's their team, how they're distributing different responsibilities.
So, that alone is a big task, but that is something that we want to address in, hopefully, in the next report and also trying to find ways to diversify the funding sources.
That's awesome.
Well, if I can add something.
I think about the future of funding, you know.
What Gitcoin is doing for Desai, I think it's very valuable and it really brings something special.
But at the same time, I believe that there are some, like, limits to that system because, for instance, you know, the last one, it was 500k.
So, to some extent, it's a lot.
But as well, it's very little, you know, compared to the needs, I believe, you know, that Desai will have in the future.
So, one thing I believe is that the Desai ecosystem should be very ambitious and realize that potentially it could become, like, very, very big and much bigger than what Gitcoin can offer, you know.
And I hope that in the future, you know, one day we will have ones, not of 500k, but, like, 5 billionk, you know.
So, this is how I believe Desai will be big, you know, in the future.
So, and, well, I hope there will be a protocol that will enable us, you know, to sustain that.
But, yeah, something I think to bear in mind is that on the long run, the ambition of Desai should be much bigger than this.
Definitely agree with that.
And excited to see more and more public goods funding ecosystems and mechanisms popping up out there.
I think, you know, we need plurality in this space.
We need a lot of different mechanisms to make sure as many things as we can are getting funded and that the right things are getting funded.
Also, if anyone's curious about Gitcoin and ever wants to chat about it more, feel free to DM me.
And also, follow all of the amazing people here on Twitter.
Shout out Aaron Caro Pancho.
All right.
Well, thank you to everyone for tuning in today.
We're all available on Twitter.
And happy to answer any additional questions that folks might have, whether they're pondering on things later, see other opportunities down the line.
I think there is an appetite throughout the entire ecosystem to keep conversations open and fluid between everyone and all the different thoughts that might arise, especially as we all have unique backgrounds and perspectives that are essential to keep moving this space forward.
With that said, I want to be respectful of everyone's time and just really thank you for tuning into this conversation and being part of continuing to progress DSI forward.
In addition to what Erin said, just, you know, if everyone has any other questions you want to ask for us, don't hesitate to DM me or DM me or DM Aaron or Pancho.
It would be delightful to answer any questions or feedback.
Maybe you didn't have the time yet to read all the file, but if you can do it, do it.
And if you have any feedbacks, we would be very happy to receive it.
So thank you.
Thank you guys for joining us in this space and we hope to see you soon.
Thank you, everyone.
I have to go now, but thank you for everyone who joined this conversation.
And yes, any questions, just ask us, send a DM.
Bye bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
