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DeSci Rising | DeSci Nigeria | ep 8
Recorded: May 7, 2025 Duration: 0:54:48Space Recording
Short Summary
D-Sci Nigeria is making waves in the decentralized science community with strategic partnerships, funding initiatives, and plans for growth. The organization aims to empower researchers through community collaboration and financial support, marking a significant step towards enhancing access to scientific resources in Nigeria.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you
masa are you doing
hi jelani i'm excellent how about you i'm doing good um so your audio sounds good um how are you doing oh i can hear myself in the background
can you can you mute the playback yeah uh can you still hear yourself now? No, I don't think so.
Okay.
No, I can hear myself still.
Let me see.
What is causing that?
Okay, let's try that again.
How about now?
Let's see.
Sounds good. Okay, this sounds good. All right, all right, cool. see. Nope. Sounds good.
Okay.
This sounds good.
All right.
All right. Cool.
Yeah.
If you, I mean, you can invite your, your, your personal account.
You just have to mute whatever, like turn off the sound on whatever.
If it's on your laptop, just turn off the sound.
I did, um, you know, uh, I didn't mute the other time.
I just decreased the volume to the lowest.
But let me try that again.
Let me see if it works now.
I'm going to mute.
Okay, it's muted.
Can you still hear yourself now?
Okay, I think that works.
Cool.
Well, thank you for coming here, man.
I think this is going to be a good chat.
We definitely don't have enough design africa
related content out there or not nearly as much as it should so i think this is going to be a good
hopefully insight for people to understand the value proposition the opportunities that are in
the african ecosystem but also how desai can be applied to various specific niches that have their
own issues or their own context with which to apply science,
and we can start to explore that.
Yeah, of course.
Thank you for inviting me as well.
I'm happy to share what we're doing here in Nigeria.
And yeah, looking forward to how we amplify the space
and see how other people in parts of Africa
can also contribute, collaborate,
and work across borders and across countries.
Yes, I would love that.
So the way we usually kick this off is we have a little intro that I'll give,
and then we can jump into the questions and commentaries,
and people will filter in as time goes on.
We'll be releasing clips afterwards, and then you can use that at your discretion,
and we can use it to amplify any
messaging that that is important here so i'll kick it off hello everybody my name is jelani
and welcome to season two episode eight of the dc rising series put on by dc world where our goal
here is always to provide an opportunity for the many wonderful projects on our growing dc
dashboard to just
formally introduce themselves, update their progress, highlight their achievements, and just generally engage with both the DSiWorld and the wider DSi community.
Right? And the goal behind this is always that at DSiWorld, we very much believe that
more than the tech, more than the funding, it is the community that are going to be leveraging
these tools that are really going to usher in many of the changes that we're hoping for D-Sci
to bring to the various legacy STEM industries.
Now, in today's episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Mosaduluwa Fasasi,
who is the founder of D-Sci Nigeria, which is a community that fosters
decentralized science in Nigeria, and I'm sure in a variety of different
places as well, or in collaboration with others, empowering research through funding community and open collaboration so with that
mosa again thank you for taking the time out of your day um to come and speak with us and to kind
of let us know more about the community that you've built and kind of some of the great work that you
guys are doing oh again thank you for inviting me.
And you pronounced my name perfectly, so good to see you for that.
Yeah, I'm sure that happens a lot.
So the space is a dedicated space for yourself.
But as much as we want to showcase and explore the projects,
DSI projects are so early and the space is so early.
What's oftentimes more impactful is getting a good insight on who the founders are,
the team with the vision and all that kind of stuff.
So I'd love to hear your origin story,
especially because I realized as I was going through your guys' website,
you have a very strong emphasis on students
and creating an environment for students
to kind of foster a path that they may want to seek.
And I also realized going through your guys' GitHub,
you have a lot of student focus there.
So I would like to understand, like,
what has been your journey to DSI
or what attracted you to DSI
and where were you prior to that?
Okay, great. So prior to that, I finished university. I graduated studying education
and chemistry in 2022. And in late 2024, I found SIOP. I found SIOP and I was really, really intrigued and fascinated by what she has been doing over the last 30 years. That is Alexander Olbakian, who founded SIOP. And, you know, I dug into the story, read about, you know, the many, many things she's built, the database that has over millions and millions of papers published, not published, but shared across, you know, different countries and different across continents.
So that was kind of like the starting point for me into looking more into Desai and looking at the offering that it provides.
provide so i realized that the origin story for syob was that you know alexander herself was
seeking to study further and what happened at the time was that she wanted to study a particular
course but at the time it wasn't available it wasn't it wasn't really well taught so the places
that she could find they were they were there were really few people that were talking about this particular niche. She said,
skip me now that I mentioned the niche, but she sought to just look online and find people that
have written, people that have done anything in this regard. And the ones that she found,
it turned out that they are paywalled. So she couldn't access these papers because of financial
constraints and everything. So that was the origin story of
Sireb itself, because that was when she began to look for ways to boycott these papers and then
share them online. And I felt as an African, as a Nigerian, I felt like, okay, this is something
that I can relate to because here you sometimes don't have access to the, you know, updated resources, updated, you know,
papers on findings, you know, from Global South, right, or Global North, pardon me,
you don't have access to all of those things. And if you do have access to it, like,
you are unable to access them because of the financial constraints that come with them. And
I'm like, okay, fine. This is a good, good avenue for students.
And because I've been in the shoes as that, right, I thought, okay,
this is going to be the approach that I'm going to start with.
I'm going to tell as much people about SIOP so that they can take advantage of it,
especially students first starting with that.
And they can use it for their final year studies.
They can use it for their, you know, anybody that wants to learn anything
fascinating at all, that wants to start any project, they can use it on their
own personal discretion.
That was, that was the first angle of it.
And then the second thing I follow that is, um, in Nigeria, in Africa,
most of Africa, the, the way the graduate works is that after your four, five, six years, depending on the course that you're offering, you are expected to carry out a research project at the end of your study.
So it is student led. You do all the work by yourself, but then you assign the supervisor. So what I also realized from personal experience is that most students are not, don't see the incentive in actually putting their oil into this research because of, you know,
research is still under-resourced in, you know, this part of the world. And it is still,
the infrastructures to support it are not there. They're basically just being built out, right? So I see DESAI or DESAI-NG as a way to support that, right?
To be a part of that infrastructure for students.
So what we do is that we incentivize students, right,
to carry out this research and then we upload their projects on our repository.
This is going to also, is a way for them to share their work,
collaborate with other researchers that are working across disciplines,
and hopefully snowball into project ideas, inventions,
innovations that impact our immediate environment and broader African space.
So that's the origin story and what we've tried to experiment with up until today.
I love the inspiration from Sci-Hub.
I think Sci-Hub has, for those of us who've leveraged Sci-Hub, it's been a fantastic tool
or was a fantastic tool at a point where it was more readily available.
And I'd like to say, though I could be a little bit wrong, but it really sparked this
innovation into, or this paradigm shift into pre-publishing, right?
So you don't necessarily have to publish the total sum or the fully peer-reviewed.
There are bio-archives and different types of journals that are kind of pre pre manuscript
publishings um and i i think scy hub was one of the catalysts to help initiate that that kind of
shift into something that is a little bit more loose get your information out there and allow
the community at large to weigh in on you know the value proposition of your work and it sounds
like you guys are have taken at least a page from that book
in providing a space for at least the local community or the local scientists,
and especially the students, to build out a repository of their knowledge
that others can weigh in on.
And so congratulations for that.
I always like to commend those who have taken initiatives upon themselves to make
science a little bit more accessible, a little bit more amenable to the average person.
Um, so first and foremost, that it's fantastic.
Yeah.
Thank you for that.
What kind of, I mean, you mentioned incentives that we can go into, I guess,
a little bit further into that, but, but maybe first, how many students have
participated in this initiative of yours
okay so we started about uh in december late december 2024 and we put out a call to just you
know test out and see who's interested was i'm curious enough to just learn lean on this new
path that you know um decentralization offers us so we put out a call we got about 15 student
researchers and currently we're working with 10 and three of them have concluded their research
projects they have submitted and then they are presented to their schools they've you know
approved them they've graduated so we have their papers on our repository and that was that
was like the version 1.0 that we did and we still have others we are we are currently looking at
um the students finishing so that we can access what is working what is not working how can we
improve these you know method and logic better to serve other people in the community and extend it towards other
parts of Nigeria. So currently I have 10 students, there are still six students now,
minus seven, minus three. So we have seven students that are still currently undergoing
their research studies. And yeah, that's where we have right now.
And so they're openly publishing or they're openly
contributing the knowledge that they're accruing onto that one platform? Yes exactly. Okay that's
really good so how did you is the by incentive does it did you mean that you've provided them
a space or there are there actual incentives that you're kind of weaving into this process?
actual incentives that you're kind of weaving into this process?
So when we started, I mentioned that the inspiration, the big inspiration behind
Desai Nigeria was CyOB. So I reached out to this. I partly contributed to the growth of
the global meme community of CyOB. I don't know if you know about that. Yes, I do. But yeah, I partly contributed to it and I spoke with the initiator and he offered us some funding for, you know, some partnership support for the project.
And we were planning on, you know, supporting initiatives, student led initiatives, and then we got some support from them. So we offer students some funding to continue their research, whether it's sourcing
for materials, buying materials, or paying for papers online that are not available even on
SIOP or other open access website or repositories. So we provide this funding for them to just ease the process of, you know, fact finding the process of the project
itself. And, you know, some people would usually travel from their schools to local communities
that they're working in. Some students would have to manually still print because some project
supervisors and advisors would prefer that for correction or per submission or per review that you're doing,
you have to print out the ad copies to come.
This is part of what these are
the things that some of the funding that we
provide them allows them to do.
That's what we're currently doing.
I love that story because I am
somebody who is particularly skeptical of memes,
and especially the application of
financial tokens in the decentralized science
space. I've seen a lot of it's a lot of people have tried it. Very few of them have have worked
in a way to create sustainable impact, sorry, sustainable flywheels, let alone actually drive
impact. But it sounds like you guys are leveraging or at least have collaborated with those who are
willing to leverage their economics
to actually help support real world change in science and i think that is a testament or or at
least should be a guiding north star to how these kind of dsci related memes should ultimately be
leveraging um part of the treasuries that they're amassing. I think that's great.
Yeah, definitely. Some of
the think tanks in the decentralized space have been
asking the question for some time now,
can meme coins be more than what it already is?
Can it be used in real-world utilities,
real-world use cases that can better
the collective good of more people than just a select few.
And yeah, I think what Sayob is really, really doing is very inspiring.
And like I said, the original mission by Alexander herself,
and then the support that she's getting from the meme community itself,
because they have also donated to her personally.
I know of that.
They have donated personally to her to keep, you know,
running our repository, to keep running psyhub,
to keep running, you know, operations basically.
And it's really, really good to see.
Yeah, I have to get psyhub, the meme community up to talk about that.
Because I remember three years ago, I think almost three or four years ago, I had reached
out to Alexandra to tell her, to talk to her about the DSI movement.
And there was very little interest.
There was still a lot of skepticism around the application of crypto and blockchain in
science.
But it seems, hopefully, if they've managed to connect with her and they're able to help
support her, that this has hopefully changed the tide of her perception. But with regards to DSI Nigeria,
alongside the funding that you're giving to help support these young researchers, which again,
I want to double click and say that is fantastic. Is there also a component that broadens their knowledge of DSi in and of itself,
or at least provides them with certain toolings or
orients them towards certain communities that can help
further enhance their research endeavors?
Yeah, that's something we also established right on the get-go,
that this is more than we are only a small part of the larger ecosystem
and we are willing to
introduce them but the thing is or a little bit of friction there is that web3 decentralization
is still very very nascent and very early in this nigeria i mean we're doing fantastic fantastic
compared to um maybe say or you know in adoption rates right nigeria is spearheading it in africa right but it's still
compared to the number of you know the population the number of people available it's still very
very um minute so what we are doing is we're gradually introducing the tools the the you know
the communities that can help further it research findings and their project and people
that they can collaborate with based on their discipline and then their course of interest.
So we made that clear on the get-go and we're slowly watching how things evolve and how
things go further from just after their project.
Because one of the other big inspirations
that led into this is that most of these students, like I said, initially, they are under-resourced
and under-funded, right? The incentive is not there. So after the project, nothing happens,
right? They just, you know, submit it to their universities and then it just stays there,
right? Nobody even knows about it, right? right so but this is a way to take that further and to apply it into real world so that it doesn't
doesn't just end with you know collecting the the degree or the certificate from the school and then
and then leaving it there so yeah we are introducing them to the tooling and there was a tool um an
open access tool that uh Cyop community also developed.
It's called the scientific search engine
that we've recently introduced.
So basically you need to have some Cyop tokens,
like a thousand Cyop tokens to be able to access,
pro features and premium features.
So we put out a call that we were giving 10 researchers
a thousand tokens each.
And a few of them reached out,
were asking them, okay, do you know about Web3?
Do you know how to create the Solana wallet?
Do you know how to do this and that?
So looking for ways to incorporate that
and bring them also on chain,
but to make sure that it is done appropriately
so that they don't just lose, lose, what's it called?
People are still very, very skeptical about crypto
and decentralization, meme coin, all of those things.
So yeah, we're slowly just watching it, testing things out, right?
And then slowly watching how it evolves.
So let's talk about that because you bring up a really interesting point.
So as somebody who works in the traditional science space,
as much as I work in the decentralized science space, I also see similar frictions of adoption and skepticism.
In your opinion, and based off of your community or the ones that you've been dealing with, what do you think is required in DSI for those barriers to kind of start to be relieved, right?
To reduce some of that friction.
You mentioned wallets, you mentioned, you know, portals through Solana,
because I guess Sci-Hub is a Solana meme coin.
All of these things, in my experience, are additional barriers
and additional learning curves that sometimes dissuade people
from wanting to participate.
But I'd love to kind of hear your, based off of your experience,
how do you think the space can improve to help facilitate
the actual onboarding and adoption of some of these tools
by whether it be local researchers or students or whomever?
Yeah, good question.
I think most of these things, the technology, the tools, the infrastructure
that still need to facilitate this are still currently being built
because we're still in the very, very early stages.
And when we think about the local applications that we are familiar
with Web2 applications of this world, the Visa, the MasterCard,
the financial rail know railways right
they are so integrated into our lives and i think that one way that can facilitate adoption is if
we continue to work on the rails that have already been provided i know this there's a lot of tension
about this topic in the you know in the decisionization space or in the decentralized space
whereby you know people are worried about okay do you lose um ownership do decentralization space or in the decentralized space, whereby, you know, people are worried about, okay, do you lose ownership? Do you lose control? Or are you
going back to what used to be, right? But we are seeing stuff like, you know, MasterCard,
Circle, you know, partnering over the last, was it last month that I saw the announcement?
So these integrations and these, you know, interoperability is what would, is one of the things that I think would facilitate and help more people get on board.
If they see that, oh, MasterCard is, you know, hopping on this thing.
Okay, it helps me do this.
It helps me do that.
It makes it easy.
I don't need to learn all the technical stuff.
I don't need to really dive deep and learn a whole new universe on its own, right?
So I think that that is going to be
a huge, huge plus. Yeah, I agree. That's definitely from the financial rail perspective. I just
sometimes struggle to see the similarity between that and what that would look like in science,
because the effective comparator would be, you know, in the publishing realm, these journals
adopting these crypto rails or these blockchain rails to help, you know, facilitate the publishing realm, these journals adopting these crypto rails or these web,
these blockchain rails to help, you know, facilitate, I guess, ownership of their,
of the, of the assets by their, by the, by the authors. But then that is almost
antithetical to their business models, right? Where they are effectively the custodians and
owners, and they set the terms with which to access,
going back to the concept of prohibitive price walls to get through.
And so it's very difficult for me to see, and I completely agree, you almost have to have,
you have to have institutional buy-in. You need to have things that make people,
that remind people of how it currently works so that they are not spooked by it and that
it may feels comfortable and streamlined for them but in a way that still or does not take away from
what the actual purpose is and giving them control and ownership to a certain extent
over the things that they're creating or and or supporting them in their initiatives whether it
be through funding mentorship mentorship, community.
I think there's a number of verticals that we still have to tackle in the space.
And I think it's important to keep fostering these conversations, especially for people
who are coming in so that they're not.
They're not sold a dream.
They're sold of a practical understanding of this is this is like step one 1,000-step journey to get to a point where this can help.
And each contribution that they are, every time they participate, their entry point at this point is helping them kind of participate in that revolution.
We're not at the end.
We're at the beginning.
And so there's definitely not – there's a huge focus on the tech there's a huge focus on the tooling but i think communities like yours communities
like many of the other local citywide municipal wide national nationwide communities are actually
the fundamental pillars that we need to be leaning more into. I really, truly love the fact that you had a meme
community support you in terms of initiating a community-led initiative to bring people into
the space. Ultimately, that's what we need more of. Ed here, who's in the crowd, there's another
great example of a huge champion and advocate for regenerative agriculture community. The tech that
they use is definitely amazing, and he talks about it a lot,
but if that is not getting to the people,
if we're not praising the people who are coming in,
if we're not taking anecdotal stories
to entice others to come in
and show it that it can affect them as well,
like, we're never going to get the traction that we need, right?
So, yeah.
Yeah, totally agree with you. okay so so then explain to me tell me you know what's what's on the roadmap what's what is next to be expected for for design nigeria i mean if you
guys are already building out a community of researchers is there a goal to flip this into
or to turn this evolve this into something where you have regular meetups you have regular meetings
you have dsai sessions or whatever just science sessions in general, maybe host a conference
and that kind of stuff. I'd love to learn more. Yeah, yeah, totally. That is part of our roadmap.
And before that, we are currently dealing with undergraduate students and we are looking at also expanding this to graduate and
even possibly postgraduate students. We want to sort of like bring these people together in a way
and sort of consolidate the effort into because like I said initially these infrastructures that
bring people together are not there. They are not, they're practically being built.
And this gives us an edge, an advantage for us to build,
be a part of the build of those infrastructures, right?
So we are working with students
and then we are seeking to expand
to meet graduate students and postgraduate students,
bring them together, look for, you know,
the younger ones and then connect them to the older,
maybe not older, but for you know the younger ones and then connect them to the older maybe not older
but you know more advanced research levels in various disciplines connect them together you
know and see how we can we can form a coolist and then form a coalition between these people bring
them together and then we can now begin to host meetups and then talk about these things
on a very larger scale in the country you know hosting events and then long-term vision is also
even probably building out a laboratory or the first DESAI lab in Nigeria right to
support these things like I like I always say I don't see DESAI as just a way to overhaul the existing system.
I see it as an alternative path.
That is the way I see it.
So there's an existing path or for some people or in some places,
the path is almost inexistent, right?
But then this is an alternative path that can allow us get to where we're going
faster and do much more with more people.
So that's kind of like the sketchy roadmap.
Like I said, it's still a lot of experimentation.
Like Desai is still very, very young.
We are still, you know, tweaking things and seeing what works, what doesn't work.
And, you know, along the line, we're taking each step by the day
and seeing how this can evolve into something monumental.
You put it perfectly.
I guess you put it very similar to how I envision it, right?
It's not a, Desai is not a competitive, our competitor to traditional science.
It's a complementary paradigm that allows people to pick and choose the path that works best for them
and cobble together the actual steps and the blocks that are needed to achieve whatever endpoint they're looking to achieve.
And so it's, I think it's a very concerted way of, of, of, or
comprehensive way of describing this, this kind of shift to go back to, to some
of the students that you mentioned, what are the, what are the kind of research
paths or industries that you're seeing all across the six that were part of your
initial initiative, right? You've seen, are you seeing more biomedical applications,
a hard science
quantum agriculture like what what kind of research um has funneled this way into your community
okay so we've seen you know students from the medical discipline we've seen from food science we've seen from um engineering we we've seen from
political science and the way we have this diversity because of you know again i go back
to sire because when you check the database and the repository started out with the sciences but
you know as they progressed they had to open up the channels for you know places things like
humanities or you know political science and all
of those things. Now he has a whole range of diverse courses and disciplines. So we're also
taking that approach. But yeah, for now, we have an engineering student, a political science student
has completed E's. We also had a nursing student who has completed EAS. We have three people currently from the food science department that are still doing some experiments and still testing out their hypotheses.
And yeah, that's kind of, so we have a mix of the sciences and the humanities.
That's really good. I think we need, we definitely need more of the humanities in this space, less of the, not less, but I guess to counterbalance the over-representation of definitely the biomedical space.
And then some of the others. And I, again, I love to, I would love to see pipelines for these people to join communities or at least to foster like pseudo communities of existing initiatives. So whether it be, you know, Valley Dial for people
who are working on synthetic biology,
you know, making sure that we nucleate
a local synthetic biology community
in Nigeria or in whatever jurisdiction,
you know, people are applying this to.
I think that's where,
I think the mentorship piece is,
especially for nascent scientists,
so the undergrads and even the grad students,
the biggest value
for them in this space is access to mentors.
I think that is something that is overlooked as well.
The funding is cool, but most of that funding is not going to be like, it's not going to
be the be all end all of things, at least for the most part.
It's being able to connect with those key opinion leaders,
those expert, quote unquote, experts in the field, and be able to iterate and ideate off of what
your next step should be in your research. I think that is extremely valuable, more so than
most anything else. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. We got this, I think, the landscape that I've shared with most of the researchers that they can just, you know, look up and see DAOs and, you know, other initiatives that are doing stuff in their disciplines that they can, you know, just find synergy into and then we're happy to just make the introductions for them once they pass through here.
We offer them, we're working on offering them
Unchain certification that gives them
validity for whoever they're talking to in the space,
so that they can take them in.
Because like I said, this space is very,
very wild and wide, very vast.
Yeah.
I see Victor is here in the audience.
Victor, shout out to Victor.
Victor, we haven't spoken in a long time,
but Victor is the founder of Crypto Use and D-Scius,
which is an initiative very similar to what you're talking about.
Like, how do we galvanize and how do we usher in nascent scientists into the space?
So it'd be great for you guys to connect.
Victor, if you wanna say anything,
please feel free to put in, I'll bring you up.
Ed, same way for yourself.
So I think the power here to your point is compounding.
If there are more of these community groups
interacting with each other,
then we can start to make this wide space,
which is true very, very broad,
into at least, you know,
carvable areas where people can pit
stop and learn about certain things along their, along their journey for, for design Nigeria.
Yeah.
You know, the question I often hear about communities is, are you going to become a
DAO?
Is there going to be some structural overhaul?
How do you envision not just the direction that the entity is going but the
actual formation and structure of dsai nigeria i'd love to understand more about your vision there
okay so when we started i we almost started as a meme community just to support you know
psyop like i said but quickly i realized that that was not going to be optimal for us
because we are a very young community.
People are still very skeptical about crypto and, you know,
meme coins and its utility in real world, right?
And so we had to quickly wind down and close our group
to just a select few people who work with me and who contributes to it.
Yeah, we had to just make that pivot hard and fast.
So just a few people just doing the grunt work and then seeing,
experimenting low key and, you know, in a very, very controlled,
small environment.
And, yeah, we also invited a PhD student from, a PhD graduate,
pardon me, from a PhD graduate,
pardon me, from a Nigerian university
to also join as an advisory member
of the community organization, right?
So we have that and the way I see it is going to,
we're still gonna open it more to more people to join
and contribute as a, maybe like a DAO,
but at the moment what we are doing is still growing small and scaling as we grow.
So, yeah, that's the roadmap.
That's what we're working with right now.
I have a fantastic person that you should talk to.
His name is Michael Kuh.
He is Marcus Kuh, I'm sorry.
He is building, in the process of building a DSI fellowship program,
He's building, in the process of building a DSI fellowship program, like a full curriculum of what it would take to teach somebody, and especially students, on what DSI is, but also what are the opportunities at large, what are the communities and the specific pillars that you would need to have to excel and leverage the assets that exist in dsai space.
And so if your goal is to, is to build something similar to help build, like
bring people in, I think Marcus would be a great person for you to be in
contact with.
Awesome.
I'll be the track.
He's based out of Malaysia.
So there might be a little bit of a time difference, but otherwise, um, very,
very cool kid, young, extremely smart. And and i think that's that's what we need so that this kind of the fault the
the the counter point to the community initiatives is there's a lot less tangibility
right there's things that are just you know ushering people in is is one thing but effectively
have them stick and to give them something that they'll stay and actually use and munch on is to build something.
And that's not trivial, right?
Like, there's a reason why it's very difficult, but I think it's a challenge worth having.
I'd love to have, like, an actual.
And we see this with, we saw this with Aaron and Barat for the D side fellowship.
Uh, they're the muse matrix D side fellowship too.
Like we're starting to see these education, these education platforms
starting to come out.
Um, and that's great.
Um, and I liked that you, you know, I liked that you, I liked the transition.
It made me chuckle.
I have a transition of saying, you know, he started as a mean community and that's
fine because that'll bring in a bunch of people,
but at some point you kind of got fat because if you want to move
somewhere,
you need to kind of buckle down and maybe do away with some of the,
some of the noise.
basically distill out who is here for the actual mission and who is here
for,
for hype.
So I think that was a very,
and for you to do it so
quickly so you guys have only been around since december so like that's like six months um that's
quite uh that's quite salient of an idea yeah yeah spot on spot so so are there are there any um
uh conferences that you guys will be attending is there an opportunity for some of the wider
community to come in contact with you and i also love to know learn more about who else is part of
the community you mentioned the phd but i've seen a few other names involved and love to kind of
learn what what their roles are and and how they how they kind of came into this but more so
importantly i'd love to meet the team at some point. Do you guys intend of participating in any of the either
Web3 or science and or DCI conferences that are
happening around the world throughout the year?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Would love to.
I have about three,
four people that are more active,
actively contributing to
you know, the Nigeria and I've been to stay at the wheel.
So we are looking, we are looking to, you know, get that,
you know, exposure, connect with other people across, across
the world. And I was in contact with Dessa in New York, his
name is Dr. Michael. Yeah, Michael. So I, we were talking around the early days of, you know, when the boom, I mean, before the market got nuked and everywhere went red, we were talking in one of those spaces.
And we're still talking about, you know, collaborating and connecting and seeing ways, which I personally just asked him that, do you, you know, how can the bigger communities that have been in
existence for a reasonable number of you know months years help younger growing communities
like desa nigeria and you know he was he was very open to it and said um yeah um if you need anything
just you know shoot a dm and let's talk so we are open to more of that partnership collaboration and
you know exposure and possibly attend some of the some. So we are open to more of that partnership, collaboration, and, you know, exposure and possibly attend
some of the conferences.
I'm not sure of anyone that is happening currently
at the moment.
Do you know any like that would love to be a part of it?
Well, I guess it depends how far you want to go.
Token 2049 just finished.
But there are a number of european uh based conferences dc berlin is coming
up soon um there was sin bio beta in in san francisco that's a little bit far um if you stay
if you if you stay on if you're on twitter long enough you'll you'll see some of them and then
there's dc world's website has a an event calendar where people can upload
and and will post their events throughout the year um we post the many events that we participate in
throughout the year um so the yeah there there will be a number and you could definitely i'll
throw them your way uh personally as i as i learn more about them but to that last to that to that
point that you mentioned and ed i'm going to bring you up, to that point that you mentioned, and Ed, I'm going to bring you up, um, to that point that you mentioned about speaking with
Michael and some of the bigger product or the projects that are, have been
around longer, what do you, what kind of support are you looking for?
So if you were to put an ask out there, what are some of the key things that you
would love to get or love to collaborate on with some of these, uh, existing
at or left to collaborate on with some of these existing projects.
projects?
So I've always just loved a symbiotic relationship and I
believe that partnership should work like that or else it's just,
you know, parasitic.
So yeah, I would to, to, for, for Michael,
something that was on my mind initially was the app,
this, you know, a reward product that he have, which was, I think it's called Aura.
I think there's a ring that helps you track your sleep and, you know, some of the bio data.
And, yeah, it's that kind of partnership.
What do you have?
What are you looking to scale?
What are you looking to test?
What are you looking to experiment?
We can help you do that here, collect data and, you know, collect the information that you need.
And then in turn, you help, you know, grow the community. What is our current priority for now?
We are supporting undergraduate research. Okay. We want to host conferences. You're going to
feature as a headline sponsor, headline partner, something like that, right? Something that benefits
both sides, just looking for ways to, you know, just help each other. I think that's, that's,
that's a non-trivial thing, right? I think that's a really good point because, at least from a medical perspective, for things like the Oura rings and similar.
And just for reference, there are Oura rings, but then Elata Biosciences is coming out with their own asset ring.
Axon Dow is coming out with their cure ring.
Like, there are a number of these wearable products that are coming out of the Desai space
that I'm not too sure how they differ
from the Web2 counterparts
beyond potentially being more sovereign
and having more self-custodial aspects to them.
But definitely being able to connect
or reaching out to these ones and saying,
hey, we have a community of people here
that may be willing to participate.
That kind of data,
considering the lack of representation
of generalized human data in biomedical studies
is extremely important, right?
So I think you may have something there.
If you craft it properly,
you may very well have the thing to actually entice
and pull people, some of
the larger communities in to participate with you in some of these initiatives.
Yeah.
Ed, I brought you up.
Go ahead.
Hi, Ed.
I'm curious in your country, in your context, how does communication and collaboration generally work?
I mean, I find that's the biggest hurdle we have is, you know, how to really have sustainable
and effective and, you know, day-to-day sort of communication platforms to build anything,
to get, to bring collaborations together to educate
people about what you're doing um i don't know how much is live how much is you know online
how much is conferences because i i mean my hope and what i've been trying to work on is a
I hope, and what I've been trying to work on, is a different form of online platform that's sort of away from the sort of a decentralized platform.
I don't find Discord being that effective.
I do like the fact that it has categories because we're so used to a single thread through social media, and that doesn't work for collaborations as i found um the
old php bb open source platforms were very effective in the early 2000s but social media
sort of took over those and people sort of forgotten their effectiveness and usability but
and usability, but I'm wondering how you see on really making it significant, you know,
and efficient by really building some way of communicating and sustaining these threads
of ideas so you keep a discussion going on all the areas that you're trying to connect
together.
Because like I'm in agriculture and yet agriculture is
connected to food systems to nutrition to medical to local economics to processing to engineering
you know you have to really tie all those together to really change a system and you need some kind
of a a platform to really understand that holistic vision that we need to have.
So I'll end it there.
What do you see in Nigeria to do that?
Yeah, good question.
The way I see it or the way things are currently is that we are largely online, right?
I, you know, just did a brief Google search the other day,
I found Desai Africa,
and I see a lot of their stuff on Twitter,
and the events they host and the partnership
that they have been able to garner.
But like you said, we need a form of a one-stop shop
where you can just go and find stuff on
what is happening in Desai in you know what is happening in desai
in nigeria what is happening in desai in africa you need that kind of space and it's also one
thing that we are trying to do at desai nigeria to see how we can possibly collaborate with desai
africa because if you think about africa nigeria nigeria is a part of africa so to collaborate
with them and see if we can build something like that, whereby anyone
from within Nigeria or outside Nigeria is looking for the resource, the news, the information,
the development that is going on in Desai, in Africa, you can go there and then see the
team, speak with the team members, see the project, reach out and cross collaborate.
So that is something that we're actively working on.
And I am going to keep you in the loop as we progress.
But for now, we're just basically still online on Twitter.
And yeah, that's just how we operate for now.
So Ed, I think to a certain extent, there's also a generational difference, right?
So for those of us who grew up in the forum PHPB boards, PHPB boards, that, that resonates with, with us, right? Cause we, we grew up with that. Um, but a lot of science
and a lot of collaboration does happen on these current day, uh, platforms. I like yourself,
I'm not a fan of discord. I think it is very, uh, there's a lot of discord in discord. Um,
and it's very hard to keep, to keep track of a lot of things, but there are
a number of people who love it and who utilize it.
So I think the, the, the true answer to that question is, is multimodal.
Uh, some people will resonate, especially the younger people who are only no
discord will resonate very well with that because that's, that's all they've
known some of us who've had less.
Well, not necessarily less sophisticated, but less noisy platforms, less optional platforms, platforms with less options.
It's a lot more straightforward to deal with.
And we just kind of have to have a divide where you can have power users who want multimodal and you can also have like the simplistic version that just gets to the point um and allows people to do that we at dsai world are building something or have been
building something that hopefully um not solves but contributes to the development of a one-stop
shop for for dsai um at least for some activities but there are a number of others i think research
hub from a perspective of peer review and building and
effectively being a Reddit counterpart, like a DCI or publishing version of
Reddit as they themselves claim, I think do a really good job.
And it's just to Ed's point, I think as, as, as important as it is to build
out the tooling, as important as it is to build out the actual community, we
need also really tight
interfaces for people to be able to do that, especially considering that we're dealing with
a decentralized framework, right? Different time zones, different locations, sometimes different
languages, and different compartments within a community should be reflective in some way that
is streamlined and optimized more so than what we currently have.
And I think that'll be the next innovation, same way that it's the next iteration of adoption,
account abstraction, you know, on like chain abstraction, all that kind of stuff.
You shouldn't have to require power users.
You shouldn't have to require everybody in your community to be a power user
to participate in whatever it is that you're looking to participate
in so that's that's my couple cents but that was a fantastic point and mostly i think that was a
great it was a great point to you talking about how do you create this comprehensive shop particularly
for the continents but then also just generally right i'm glad that you reached out to daniel
who's i'm assuming you reached out to for disa africa there's design nigeria who will have up for their own dsi rising episode very very soon like there are enough
community groups now with whole and then there's victor who's in the crowd uh for crypto youths
um dsi youths uh where there's enough of a community where you guys can probably pull
together something of substance. So, yeah.
So as we reach close to the top of the hour,
I think we've talked about a number of different things.
If there's, if there's, if there's nothing else,
if there is other things,
please feel free to jump in them or bring them up.
But otherwise, if there are any closing statements,
most of you want to make any calls to actions,
any specific asks that you have for the wider community, the floor is yours. I, yeah, I don't think I have any specific ask for,
Victor looks like his reaction, maybe you want to say something, you can just ask for the mic,
but anyways, I don't think I have any specific ask than to say that, you know,
these younger communities should be able to pull themselves together
because it's still very, very early and there's still a lot to do.
And if there is a concerted effort with local communities vertically powering up into the larger organization.
And again, shout out to Desai World for what you're doing.
And this is also part of what I'm talking about, right?
To connect vertically into that upstream, there's going to be more local effort and more local input.
And also shout out to SIO because they've helped know, keep up operations until where we are right now, right?
You know, this is also a call to action for more meme communities or more meme, you know, yeah, meme communities to look into, you know, the question that Vitalik, it was Vitalik that asked the question, what else could meme coins be? Right. So look into that question and look for innovative ways to support
projects that, you know, are trying to
answer that question essentially.
So, um, yeah, that that's, that's just my, my take on that.
Well, Moussa, thank you so much for the time.
Um, appreciate it.
It was great insight.
I'm looking forward to connecting you with, with some of the people that I know.
Marcus, uh, I'd love to spin up a proof of knowledge based operation, um, or collaboration
between design Nigeria and DC world.
And if there's any way that I can help connect you with anybody else in the space, um, please
feel free to reach out.
Um, we're now part of a, of a large, much larger community.
And to your point, we have to help each other.
So with that being said, guys, this was a great episode.
Very much enjoy it.
We'll say, again, thank you for coming up.
And I will look forward to seeing you all in our next episode,
which will probably be in two weeks, for Desai Rising.
So if there's nothing else, have a great week.
Have a great rest of your day.
Have a great morning.
And we'll talk soon.
Bye, everybody. Thank you. Bye, everyone.
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