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Scientist Spotlight: Exploring Scientist Onboarding on The DeSci Mic🎙️
Recorded: April 10, 2024 Duration: 1:04:24Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello everyone.
Thanks.
Thanks for joining us for the, I guess, you know, first episode of Desai Mike under the
new branding.
I don't know what actual episode this is.
It feels like six or seven.
By now, I've lost
count through all these great topics that we've covered so far. This week, we've got a very,
I think, important and relevant topic, which is onboarding scientists into the DSI ecosystem.
And, you know, we've got a bunch of great guests that are knowledgeable about
the subject. And as always, I'm joined by co-host Aaron McGinnis and Crypto Shrimp PhD,
who's behind the D-Sci Mike account. Yeah. Why don't you take it away, Erin, and introduce our guests.
Awesome. Yes, this conversation has been happening in so many different rooms on just how can we get
more scientists onboarded into DSI and engage them in meaningful ways, as well as introduce some of the amazing technologies and products
that are being built out right now into their daily workflow.
And we have a couple different people who I know I've personally had lots of conversations
on this topic with here right now to share some of their thoughts. And I'm really hoping that this can spark a bit more of an ongoing public discourse
about just really creating effective onboarding approaches for the entire DSi ecosystem.
And so for anyone who is a listener right now, would love to have you come up and request to speak whenever you're available to do so.
And we'll add you on up here.
I know from just those prior conversations, we should be able to have some really cool
insights and perspectives shared from a couple different angles here.
I might hop over to Poseidon Dow if someone is available there,
would love to have you share a bit from just kind of your perspective
focused on more of health, personalized health,
and how that might tie into the equation
or whatever else you might have had in mind initially
jumping up here onto the stage.
Yeah, I would love to talk. So, hey guys, my name is Marco Hubertz.
I'm the co-founder of Poseidon DAO.
And yeah, we are trying to fund personalized medicine research in the most decentralized way.
And we're currently in the process of finding scientists that have a project
that they want to get funding for.
So we recently started with that.
So when I saw the title of this space, exploring scientists onboarding,
that is exactly what we are doing as well at the
moment we have been very successful so far we had some good talks with uh stanley bishop and
if i pronounce his surname well although i can't talk much about the project
at the moment it's uh it's a work in progress but it's it's really hard so as you might
know i'm a scientist and just looking at the people my colleagues are close to me they they're
really stuck in in the old ways and it has worked for them for the past 20 30 years but it's very difficult
to convince them and introduce them in a way that they so introduce them to to web 3 and
decent life science in a way that is yeah that they don't need a break after i start pitching for like for five minutes
talking about web3 right it's very difficult to i mean it's a skill but like it's to keep it simple
while not letting out any information about dsai and web3 and the importance of it, it's very difficult to, how I would call the dinosaurs,
to bring them into D-Sci.
But yeah, I would love to hear what your guys' experience is with that.
So yeah.
Definitely, definitely.
Ronan and Eric, I know you both have some experience working with different researchers in particular. And just as you guys have been both building out your companies and products have had a lot of touch points with different researchers and scientists, kind of bringing them into
this conversation.
Ronan, maybe I'll start with you.
I know we connected a while back, just tying in some of the different ideas of network
graphs and how social posting and commentary and nano publications kind of tie into this whole equation. And I think some
of those points are really essential to this broader conversation about onboarding scientists
into DSI. But I'd love for you to kind of take it off from there. And for anyone who might not be
familiar with what you're building out, maybe a brief
overview as well. Sure, thanks Aaron. So yeah, my name is Renan and one of the co-founders of a group
called Common Sense Makers and also currently a science entrepreneur in residence and the
Estera Institute,
which is like a research institute funding AI research
and research on like innovations and science
and climate science.
So working there on the science team.
And our project really is related to science
and social media.
It's called Sense Making Networks.
And yeah, I really resonate with what Poseidon Dow, I didn't catch your name,
but what you mentioned about sort of finding ways to communicate with sort of traditional scientists.
And we see this a lot in our work. I think what we're choosing is really to
meet scientists where they are. And science social media we think is a really
uh interesting place to start because it is already a kind of form of decentralized science
it's kind of not on the official scientific record and it's very open and permissionless and
you find people there that aren't traditional scientists and also traditional scientists and
broader kind of just public you know citizen scientists or just people that are interested in science.
And all of them are talking about research and these discussions about science.
What we're trying to do is actually provide ways for those discussions to become more part of the scientific record instead of just kind of social media.
record instead of just kind of social media. So concretely, like to the point of like onboarding
scientists at DSi, what we're working on, our first prototype is a kind of social media
fairifier. So, you know, maybe Eric will also talk more about fair data, but there's the
fair data is a big thing in like the open science world findable accessible interoperable reusable data
that's the acronym and what we're working on is making social media about science actually fair
because right now it's it's scattered across all these platforms it's not part of the scientific
record and making it fair is like the first step into bringing it onto the scientific record and
we think that dsaii is really sort of well positioned
to support this kind of effort because it's providing
the sort of data storage layer and the identity layers
that we'll need if we want to sort of do something
that doesn't have to fit on the traditional kind of web
tube platforms, which is exactly what we're trying
to off-board scientists from.
Like instead of scientists posting on Twitter,
we're trying to tell them, hey, you can of scientists posting on Twitter, we're trying to tell them, hey, you can,
besides posting on Twitter,
we're gonna offer you a service that's gonna help you
mirror your posts essentially onto some
decentralized storage network with your own,
a new ID for that network.
So basically it's kind of onboarding scientists to decide
without offboarding them from social media
and in the hopes that eventually, you know, they'll be more, they'll just, by building
the value on the sort of Web3 networks, yeah, the, you know, the sort of traditional networks
will be less, you know, people will need them less or they can keep using them, right?
We're not against people using Twitter, but we just want to make sure that if there's
valuable data on Twitter, then, or other, you know, networks that are closed, we want to make sure that it's open and accessible.
So yeah, that's kind of our project in a nutshell. I'm happy to talk more. Maybe I'll just say a
word about nano publications because you mentioned that. So this is sort of the technology we're
using to create these converting traditional sort of platform web to posts on social media that scientists make,
you know, scientists tweet something about a paper they just read or recommending some podcast about
science. All those things are actually can be converted to a data structure called a nanopublication.
So if you're not familiar with this project, it's a really interesting new concept in publishing,
which is saying basically it's nano publication.
So that's pretty speaks for itself.
It's a publication that corresponds to just a few
sort of sentences in natural language.
And it's a representation of that information
in a semantic way.
So it's not only just the natural language,
but it's also a structured representation of it.
And that makes it really easy to search for this data
and find it, right?
That's why the nano publications is sort of very much aligned
with the fair data.
And so nano publications are naturally fair and open.
And by converting social media posts to nano publications,
that's kind of the first step we see
in sort of making a new kind of social media that is more
open, more fair, and more amenable to like downstream applications that want to actually
use the scientific discourse around science and do all kinds of interesting stuff with that. If
that's like new kinds of search, new kinds of recommendation, new kinds of matching between
scientists, new kinds of review, really anything you can think of that's about, you know, making
to review, really anything you can think of that's about making sense of scientific research.
sense of scientific research.
I think you made such a great point a couple sentences back just about
being able to onboard scientists and people into DSi without off-boarding them from whatever different platforms they're already engaging
in a scientific way on and just kind of balancing and integrating some of these different habits
and behaviors they're already engaging with and integrating that into some of these new systems that are built and doing that in like a fair and equitable type of way.
I know you mentioned some of that there, which leads in nicely to some of the work you're doing, Eric.
overview on what the FAIR movement is and how that is also connecting into the DSI ecosystem
and some of the work that you're doing at DSI Labs and just how that ties into this broader
conversation as well. Sure, happy to. And sorry, y'all, there may be a little bit of background
noise as I am currently on the road.
It seems like I know most of the folks who are on this call, but for those who I haven't met,
my name is Eric. I work for a group called Desai Labs. We make research objects, which are an
encapsulation of a research project as a unit of publication.
So that includes provenance, social commentary,
a wide variety of other things, code and data,
as opposed to exclusively
having a scientific manuscript be the unit of publication.
A lot of the inspiration behind what we built or what we are
building was something called the FAIR movement.
So for those of y'all who aren't familiar, FAIR in this context stands for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
And the larger FAIR movement is a belief that the primary unit of output in academia is a data set.
It's a code file. It's not actually a PDF.
That if we were to share some of what's currently considered supplementary artifacts
in a way where they can be easily reused,
we would not only expedite scientific progress itself,
but we would give ourselves opportunities to change the ways that we think about evaluation
for research. So with the idea being, if you make an incredible code library, you should get rewarded
for said code library for its usage, for its
popularity, as opposed to it being what it currently is as a more altruistic task, as
a kind of a burden that you would do on behalf of your community with the understanding that
you're probably never going to get credit for that. So that's kind of an overview of the FAIR movement.
And in tying this back in to onboarding researchers themselves, a couple different ways that I
tend to look at this.
I mean, first and foremost, to really echo what Ronan was saying, you have to meet researchers
where you are. And beyond that, you need to talk about the problems that you're solving,
not the solutions themselves.
So a huge part of it, I think first and foremost, is setting the scene.
It's asking good questions that get someone in the right mindset
for the eventual presentation of a potential solution.
I think it's a sense of humility as conversations are being approached.
Never go in and say, hey, this is the answer.
Say, hey, this is an interesting and novel experiment that may be worth trying.
And there really are plenty of problems that can be
talked about. I'll focus more specifically on the publishing space, as that's my bread and butter,
but I'm sure people can map this over to the biotech health space and really to anywhere else
that they think is relevant. It's the idea that as a researcher, you don't get paid
for peer review, that you're spending countless hours validating the work of others, giving money
to a journal system that's not necessarily giving a whole lot back to you. It's the idea that the
replication crisis has become a fairly serious issue at this point, with a new headline
in the New York Times just about every single month of some prestigious Ivy League scholar
who falsified their life's work for a promotion.
And the understanding that not all of that is malicious, but it's problematic, to say
It's problematic, to say the very least.
the very least.
I think it's definitely something where if you set the scene correctly,
really start off by talking about the problems,
talking about the impacts of the problems,
then going into a solution, you will find better results.
results. Beyond that, keep in mind the levels of understanding the need for a better world
Beyond that,
got into the sphere of academia to try and build a better world. But at the end of the
day, they still have to put food on the table. They want to get promotions. They want to eventually make it to a point
where they have the financial and intellectual freedom
to pursue the things that are interesting to them
so that they can be altruistic.
But there's a certain amount of utilitarianism in that.
So the general mix that I try to hit
when talking to a researcher is about 20% altruism, 60%
utilitarianism, and 20% novelty. So I guess a more concrete explanation of that would be
identifying that there are problems that the world needs to change and that someone could be a part of said change.
That's 20% altruism. Talking about how any of those given problems can be solved in a way that
benefits a specific individual. So you can be paid for peer review, for example. That's about 60% of
what you need to say. And then you tack in some fun stuff about crypto, blockchain, persistence, whatever you feel like talking about at the end of that.
So that's typically a good way to approach any of those conversations.
Focus on the problem.
Put way more time into setting the scene than solving the problem.
hitting the scene than solving the problem.
And as you're talking about solutions to a problem,
focus on utilitarianism and the immediate benefits that someone gets.
Then one other thing before I close this out is actually two other things.
First off, a lot of movements have been going on over the past decade or more
around the idea of generally devaluing the
scientific manuscript and trying to build a more open and inclusive landscape for science.
I mean, first off, it's open access, then eventually going to open science. Now we're in
fair science and decentralized science, while it's not the exact same thing, does tie in pretty
closely to a lot of these topics.
So there's a lot that you can learn from studying those angles. And said angles have also received
a fair amount of attention from policymakers as well. So it depends on who you're talking to,
scientist, policymaker, librarian, whatever it is, play your cards accordingly. And then finally,
as you're talking to a scientist there are really
three things that can tie in the authoritarian side of said justification uh it's either going
to be reputation it's going to be money or it's going to be time so i can give you the respect of
your co-workers i can give you more citations i can give you it reallyations. I can give you... I can help you find alternative pathways to funding that weren't there before.
Or I can reduce the bureaucratic administrative bureaucracy that currently plagues your life.
So those are a whole random smattering before I leave cell phone signal.
a whole random smattering before I leave cell phone signal,
but would be curious if anyone has comments on any of that as I kind of just,
you know, shotgun the bunch out there.
This is also open to anyone listening in right now.
If you have thoughts or feedback on this topic of onboarding scientists into DSI
and different comments speakers have made, please request to come on up and speak.
Or if for whatever reason, you know, you're shy or you can't go on, you can't turn the mic on,
you can always drop your questions or comments uh using the chat box below um i actually really like what what eric
said there i mean um you know i think someone you know smarter than me said that you know everything
is sales in some way right and i think that uh you know er Eric really hit the nail on the head about, you know, how to actually, you know, convince or, yeah, convince, you know, like scientists, academics, researchers, what the benefits are of working with DSI or within the DSI ecosystem, right?
I think those are some very, very strong, you know, points.
Yeah. within the DeSci ecosystem, right? I think those are some very, very strong, you know, points. Definitely agree.
I was just at dinner with someone tonight
and they're in the marketing and advertising space
and they came into the conversation
just wanting to learn more about
blockchain broadly and dsci specifically and they're like oh that's that's I don't know like
not for me or like I don't really belong in that space and I'm like no we we need more of that kind
of mindset and approach and just the narrative and storytelling. And Eric, I think you brought up a really good point
or question on like just asking the right questions
of what some of those stories we might want to be telling
and also understanding some of the challenges that scientists might be
facing and would love to open this up to anyone kind of up here on stage right now or who is
listening in on any thoughts you might have regarding what should kind of be focused in on more,
whether it's from the question, problem, or solution side in Dow?
Yes, so Eric, you made some great points.
And I think that is like what you mostly described as one step further.
The problem that I experience now especially,
so I'm part of the Rasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, we have I think
like 13,000 employees and 6,000 of them are scientists. But the so the most where we can gain is where you actually bring people together and forcing or not forcing them, but giving them the opportunity to be introduced to the topic of decentralized science.
So that needs to be initiated mostly from the institute itself.
itself and they are trying to do that but there was so there was one event we had so far where
And they are trying to do that.
they tried to introduce blockchain technology but then they started talking about nfts to get access
to justin beaver's concert so instead of actually explaining potential benefit to scientists they jumped right into yeah celebrities
and stuff like that so and since then because of that they tried to organize it again and no one
joined so they had to cancel it so it's just it's just so unfortunate it's a missed opportunity
missed opportunity but i am going like yeah i'm i'm going to try to like give a presentation
myself when i have some time uh available and and try to get people enthusiastic again and
and hopefully the institute is gonna back me up on that but it's yeah it, there's so much to gain just on the institutes already.
Well, and the important part here is it's not blockchain.
It's not the solution.
It's the problem.
So, for example, I was kind of set up a conference up at the University of Maryland last week, which was, well, I contributed to it, I will say.
Other folks set it up, a lot of the decentralized geosciences nerds up there.
They're wonderful people.
And the whole point of the conference was, what are better ways that we can handle large swaths of, you know, geosciences-related data, because there's a problem surrounding
cross-organizational collaboration in the age of big data and AI.
So the conference itself was not around blockchain.
It was not around necessarily decentralized technologies, although there was a huge focus, the conference was,
what problems do we have in the space of geosciences that more advanced protocols could
potentially help with? And I think the talk that I gave there was around novel experimentation
on digitally native publication mediums. So it never, I don't think in the entire talk I even said the word blockchain, because
honestly nobody cares whether or not it's blockchain.
It's not blockchain for the sake of a novel emerging technology, it's blockchain for the
sake of streamlined cross-organizational collaboration and data publishing.
And those are two very different things.
So there are ways you can do that.
And if you're interested, I'm actually working with a couple different folks from Erasmus at the moment and would love to see if potentially they would be interested in some of the talks that you set up, if that's still a thing that's going on. Or if you would like help kind of thinking through exactly how to phrase that,
this business development, sales, marketing kind of thing
is really what I'm focusing on in the DeSci space.
So I'd be more than happy to help.
But the biggest thing is to focus on the problems,
not to focus on the solutions of the technology.
Yeah, I'm definitely going to take you up on that. solutions of the technology.
Yeah, I'm definitely gonna take you up on that. So one thing I want to say is that
when we are looking at the problem,
even recognizing problems in science
or in academic institutes is a bit of a touchy subject.
in academic institute is a bit of a touchy subject.
So to do this directly in the academic institute
is more difficult than on the conference, let's say.
So yeah, we can definitely,
I would love to set up something like that.
That's for sure.
Well, I'm curious, can you elaborate on that a little further?
On what exactly?
On the differences between establishing the basis for a problem in an academic institute
versus at a conference.
Can you elaborate?
Yeah, for sure.
It feels like when we're at a conference, we're not directly linking the problem to a specific institute.
While if we're all working at one institute and I bring up a problem, then the immediate, at least from what I heard, the immediate connection that's being made is like, oh, this is happening right here.
May it be unfair.
Right.
Okay.
The way to phrase it so that you're not assigning blame or...
Exactly.
Fair enough.
Yeah, I mean, other people might think of that differently, but the people I talked
to had that experience.
So it's very difficult to start like, look, we have this huge problem in this institute.
Let's go fix it with this and this and this.
Of course, you're not going to mention it.
It's basically like, oh, it's happening here, but it's implied.
But yeah.
Well, and that's kind of what I was talking about a second ago.
Don't state the problem.
Ask questions that get other people to state the problem I see it's it's way more about the questions you ask than it is
about the actual problem itself they all know it's a problem if you see it
there's a good chance that everyone else does too but it has to be a more
communal admission in a way that doesn't assign guilt or blame and that that is
the skill it's a hard thing to do. It really is, I feel your pain on that.
I wanted to just support like plus one,
all this conversation about sort of focusing
on the problems and the questions.
The way we're seeing it in our sort of sphere of
science social media, just asking people, you know, where do you find a lot of researchers in AI,
for example, that's the field I'm coming from, are overwhelmed with the amount of research that's
coming out. And then, you know, people have a hard time just finding like, what is the next,
what are the next papers I should be even be reading or focusing on? Or what is the, you know, people have a hard time just finding like, what is the next, what are the next papers I should be even be reading or focusing on? Or what is
the, you know, kind of current hot topic and how do you make sense of all of it? And a
lot of people, if you ask them, like, how do they keep abreast of the research? They'll
say, oh, you know, I have Twitter or Blue Sky or Mastodon or something. And, and yeah,
but they also recognize that a lot of issues with these platforms and that kind of leads in naturally to like, okay, what could we do better?
And how might, yeah, how might there be better experiences sort of in navigating all this
information?
And yeah, so I find that we get to the same sort of place of people recognizing issues
and then kind of coming together to the same problem space and talking about the ways we
could address it.
Ronan, I have an interesting question for you.
As you talk to researchers, how much do you talk about the findability of concepts,
like their ability to find someone else's work,
versus the ability for someone else to find their work?
Kind of the flip side of the same coin.
Which one do you find works better?
Yeah, that's a great question. I always ask people how they
use social media. What do they use it for? Do they use it to sort of share their own research
or do they use it to find other people's work? And a lot of people, it's both. Some people just
use it to sort of announce new things that their lab is doing or something like that. But a lot of
people use it to find new research. So I think it's it's pretty balanced um and yeah a lot of scientists use it
for both of those things i just wanted to double yeah i wanted to also plus one on some of the
things that you're saying around like going to that space, going to the place where people already are.
And this is something that I've been thinking a lot about in terms of events.
Like one thing that I heard at a recent event was someone goes, ah, a DAO is just a it's just a co-op, basically, with a bank account.
And in this way, like similarly, DSI is open science with a technology that actually allows you to do the work of open science.
But there's, I think, focusing, as Eric was saying, focusing on the blockchain as a solution is not necessarily the way to have that conversation.
It's like, hey, there's already these problems that you've spent a lot of time researching, documenting, showing up, and you're already talking about it to each other.
And so going to those spaces and being able to be like, here is like, same problems.
What are the ways that we can work through in order to actually do the work of solving these problems?
do the work of solving these problems.
And maybe like blockchain can do one or two things
within that whole subset, as opposed to being like,
oh, like everybody needs to come over and like eat our pill.
It's more of like, as Ronan was saying,
like scientists are already on Twitter.
Scientists are already having their own conferences
on open science, on how to do this work.
And kind of co-locating ourselves within those spaces seems very helpful and relevant
in this move towards being like, hey, there is a technology that can help in a way that can do
some of the work of getting us towards a more distributed open science.
distributed open times.
So there's also and it's it's another reason why it's so
difficult to sell blockchain is the idea that the problems
which blockchain and decentralized technology solve
are vague and grandiose. And as you're talking to an
individual person, not necessarily relevant.
What they actually do is at a larger level, things which are, like I said,
streamlined cross-organizational collaboration.
Your average everyday researcher does not necessarily care about that.
So thinking about some of the more concrete points coming out of it,
and exactly like Ellie just said,
explaining a DAO, maybe without even mentioning a DAO,
is not a bad way to go.
It's just a set of tools
that let people collaborate more efficiently.
It's a workflow stack that can help you save time
by both automating processes
and helping you to organize information.
And that's a valuable thing. And most people actually see the value to said tool stack.
But the moment that you say DAO, bank account, crypto, it's, there's a very select group of
people who are open to that kind of rhetoric. So another thing, be careful about any and everything crypto that's
there. While tokens are a superpower of the space, in a late stage reputation economy like research,
the worst thing that you can possibly do is be wrong. Whereas the benefits for being right
are significantly lower. And the idea of advocating for Dogecoin is definitely wrong.
So just be aware and be careful around some of those things as you talk to folks.
Also, I want to say thank you for the space.
I'm starting to get to the part of my drive where all of the signal is going in and out.
So if anyone has any last questions on my comments before I have to jump off, please,
by all means.
Well, Erik, thank you for the conversation. I'm definitely going to contact you and see what we could mean for the people in the Netherlands,
our Erasmus MC, and maybe we could start properly informing them on decentralized science.
Absolutely, I would love that. And thank you. You can just reach out on Twitter,
send me a DM. Well do. I was gonna suggest, I don't know what the plan for the rest of the
conversation is, but something that Aaron and I were talking about and Eliana as well in some of the meetings back at East Denver, Eastside Denver having a kind of website or some central place,
one place that sort of your one-stop shop for like all things and onboarding to DSi. So a
new scientist, like I can point at some traditional scientists I'm talking to and say,
here's where you can go to see like all the different things you can do if you want to,
you know, get a taste of like DSi and see what it can do for you. And for example, you know, our
verifying social media could be one option and then other options, maybe using DSi nodes to
publish work, but having all those different options that, you know, scientists might be
interested in in one place and kind of easy to access. So I'm wondering if people have thoughts
about that kind of thing. Yeah, if I could jump in for a second, I mean, I think that's a really
interesting idea, almost like a D-Sci portal.
You know, perhaps D-Sci mic can be that space somehow. I'm not sure.
But I think whatever the form that this that this takes, you know, like scientists like kind of evidence. Right. I think even if it's anecdotal, like whatever whatever form that that would take, you know, it'd be cool to have some almost like case studies or like poster children, right?
Of like, oh, here's a scientist who, you know, had a great success working with DSI, right?
But a great, great thought.
I don't want to hog the mic here.
I'm sure others have thoughts.
I think that's a great idea, especially if we could get some of these scientists that have kind of already been onboarded.
Athena Dow is doing some great stuff.
And I did want to build on top of what Eric was saying earlier.
Two things, actually.
I think the most valuable thing any PI or researcher has is their time.
And asking them to learn or to dive into something or to broaden their horizons, unfortunately, is time and currency they don't have available to them.
And this comes up a lot when I talk to them about Research Hub and getting paid, you know, $200, $300 to do a peer review.
At the end of the day, for a PI, $200, $300 is not enough time for them to set aside what they could be doing.
You know, the work that they need to do for their committee, the work they need to do with their grad students that are rotating throughout their lab, finishing together a
conference presentation, putting together a grant. You know, at the end of the day, they just don't
have that amount of time. And the other thing I was going to mention was that when you're talking
about onboarding scientists, I don't think you can talk about that without talking about onboarding the
institutions at the same time, like Poseidon Dow was talking about.
As much as you can onboard a researcher at the end of the day, a researcher might not
have the autonomy or the decision-making process or ability to do things.
And a good example of this is I can't tell you how many
times I've seen collaborations or other potential projects that PIs would work on together between
like a Columbia or a Stanford or something like that. Even though both PIs are on board, both PIs
want to do the work together, it gets stifled through this process
of back and forth between MTA agreements and service agreements. So it's going to go from
one office of grants and contracts to another office of grants and contracts. And in between
each time, you know, it takes a week, two weeks for somebody to respond. And all this MTA and service agreements is all being PIs instead of, you know, getting the larger institutions as a whole involved.
Because I think that ultimately at the end of the day is where
it gets stifled. And then to speak about Ronan's thing, the other idea that I've had a lot recently
is if you think about every subset, for me, I'm in regenerative medicine. So there's this
group called ARM, the Alliance of Regenerative Medicine, and ASCGT,
the American Society of Cell and Gene Therapy.
So there's always these societies.
You have NSF, the Society for Neuroscience.
So they all have conferences.
These are where they're going to be.
First of all, I think this is where the great recruitment rounds to get the scientists on board are.
So having booths and things like that for DSI specifically set up, especially if we can get something like a DSI society set up where they're educating and advocating on behalf of the entire sector, as well as offering a network solution for the people
working in the sector as well.
And I think that could be a great place to point everybody as they're interested in,
you know, starting that journey down the DSI rabbit hole, as Rodin was mentioning.
Okay. D-Sci rabbit hole, as Rodin was mentioning. I can share just one thought, and thanks for that.
I think it's an interesting kind of distinction
between sort of individual researchers onboarding them
versus onboarding institutions.
And I think there's trade-offs involved in each of them.
And I think there's definitely a lot of value
in going to these institutions.
But like you were saying, there's
probably a lot of bureaucracy to navigate and barriers.
And I think with researchers, this
is just our personal angle on this
from looking at social media, there are a lot of low, sort of low barrier entrance points that
can bring actually like a lot of value for scientists and they don't need to, you know,
start, they don't even need, in our case, they don't even need in the beginning to use
different apps or anything. They just kind of need to say, I agree to, you know, contribute my social media data to,
you know, this fair data collection service. And, you know, it's almost, that's almost it in the
beginning. So I think there's definitely a lot of different levels of participation. And it'd
probably be good to have, like, if we're thinking about this portal, maybe some way of having people
being able to navigate, like, are you an institution are you a scientist like you know how much time do you have or just
different ways of i guess uh organizing the information like what you're saying about these
some different levels right so there's there's level one which is hey this is a cool app
and i can participate in it.
And, oh, this actually did something that's really cool.
I can now query this work that was previously hidden via Twitter's evil API, right?
And then there's, like, level two maybe is, like, conversations like this.
Someone can show up, and it's Bankless CSI, and we're talking about, like, different ways that we can engage in a community.
And then there's, like, maybe there's level three, three where it's like, okay, now you're creating side events
at other events.
It's kind of the sense of there's many different ways
and movements towards engagement.
I think one of the things that you're bringing over
and is like, there almost needs to be that base level
of ability to engage because a one-off event is like,
it's almost too big and too abstract it's
just like oh there's so many things happening and you're like that was cool but like how do I touch
it every day and so I really yeah I don't know I just really like the different ways that you think
about this is like it has to be touched every day in a way and then once you have that ability or
that handhold then we can build up to these maybe these bigger ways of
interacting and also at that point we like we would have more capacity to engage in bureaucracies
and figure out how you navigate it um as opposed to just starting off at that level
yeah i love that i think maybe we talked about this but it all it reminds me of the sort of, you know, choose your quest and you can kind of see the different quests and then.
Yeah, to, you know, different quests with different levels of sort of engagement and like demands on your attention.
But yeah, making people feel that they're kind of part of something bigger and exciting and maybe being able to see even like others progress so they're like no uh you
know 100 people from your institution have already done this and they can see who they are and just
kind of making it easy to sort of feel part of the bigger movement
these last couple points are kind of dancing around a topic of like making sure we're using
language and just kind of vocabulary that is feels comfortable and understandable to our
audience in this place, different scientists. And that's really such a key point across onboarding anyone into different ecosystems.
And I think is especially good to keep in mind and kind of top of mind within the DSI space.
As we have a couple more minutes kind of leading up to the top of the hour.
I would love to create space for a couple minutes on just kind of either brainstorming or sharing out different types of either initiatives or efforts that you,
organizations you're involved with, might be doing or ideas of things that you think should
be done within the ecosystem that might help to either connect some of these dots or really help
with kind of broader onboarding of scientists into DSCI. I guess I'd love to ask if anybody has, you know, any opinions or thoughts history. And, and even now, like I mentioned,
the like society for neuroscience and, and things like that, there's always professional
and scientific societies floating around there. I definitely think that is something that is
missing from the ecosystem. Like I said earlier, the primary aim of it would be to educate
and advocate for DSI in general with the secondary aim
of providing networking solutions and interconnectedness
between people working within the space.
Would love to hear people's thoughts on that.
Yeah, I think the idea of society is actually really good.
So if I take my professor as an example,
she's part of already like six seven societies right so
it's very difficult at the end of the day to really come through in their schedule like to
make room for another society for another set of meetings i think i was just thinking it might be
slightly off topic but here was mentioned that time is the most valuable asset.
I mean, for everyone, but in this case
for the principal investigator.
And how I experience it as a PhD candidate
is I had a total eight hours a week of meetings.
So for people, especially like principal investigators to make
room for more meetings like there needs to be this this fundamental shift in how we are
doing science currently a lot of meetings a lot of time talking rather than doing and if we add on to that even
more in more societies that you know might clog up might clog their schedule even uh even more so
i think the the problem is is a bit more fundamental before we actually
is a bit more fundamental before we actually allow principal investigators to make room for
something innovative like DSI. So I've always told my colleagues, like, once I get to the point of
becoming a principal investigator myself, I am going to get rid of a lot of meetings just to make up space for people to breathe,
have time to actually do their work, and maybe have time to be interested in other aspects of their field,
like decentralized science.
But I would love to hear other people's opinions on that.
But that's how i view it
Ronan or Ellie, any kind of thoughts leading off of these past couple comments just about
forming some of those communities or more effectively engaging people in a way that's a good use of their time as well.
Yeah, these are really great points.
I'm just thinking this kind of point about making demands on people's time,
point about you know making demands on on people's time and especially PIs are
and especially PIs who are super busy.
like super busy so I was thinking one thought I had was that yeah I think
there's also a lot of diversity in the kinds of people we can be reaching out
to so I think PIs are really really actually would be hard to get in a lot
of cases because they're so busy maybe more junior scientists might be more open to these kind of things.
And yeah, and being able to pool some of these insights that we're having as each of these groups is kind of talking to traditional scientists.
And that could be helpful just for us to kind of share insights and see what works and what people are attracted to.
It'd be really cool if we had a way to pull that kind of information
and I don't have it just kind of a thought that I started thinking about it
and yeah maybe others have ideas about how to do that.
Yeah I don't know about ideas I think this is the question in my mind right
now it's like I think a lot of the typical hypotheses around how
to create a community is create another forum. And for me, that's like the number of forums that I
am in is so high. And I'm like, okay, it's like, it's become my job to manage forums, which is
different than like, it's not what we want to do to scientists, right? The point is to return them
to their work, which right now they are pulled from by grant applications,
by unpaid peer review, by so many things.
Like there are so many tasks that aren't just doing the science
and investing in the thing that they are like so well trained
for.
And so I think, I don't know, there's
things like what Ronan is building, right?
Where it's like, they're already tweeting though.
So that's a very low level engagement. They're already going to these conferences though.
So that's a low level engagement. And it's like finding ways to create just enough engagement
understanding that's like, oh wow, what are the dividends that this is paying me? Right? So for
example, if they're working on, on a grant and it's retroactively funded and so then
it doesn't take them as much time to organize the grant application um because it's really short
really low touch and focused on the impact that's already been created that is one it actually saves
them time as a result entering the space doesn't become a loss um and there's a lot of work to do around there and
like making sure that these mechanisms are actually valuable. But it's like, I don't know,
it just, it goes back to like, the premise, the benefit, the point of what is trying to happen
is giving back the scientists their time, their resources, their stability in order to keep working on science. And so designing the
things that we have for engagement, such that they're not another meeting, another thing to do.
And instead, it becomes this ecosystem that someone's like, oh, I can survive here and also
focus on the things that are so much more exciting to me. It's more of a design principle that I
think I really agree with, but not necessarily something that I have a design solution to
at the moment. Completely. I think conversations like this are really so essential to making sure
we're continuing to progress forward in a way that is really additive in a positive way for scientists and science more broadly as well.
And I know I've kind of had lots of different ideas and thoughts blossom up throughout this conversation.
And I'm really hoping that we'll continue kind of exploring this topic and just coordinating effectively
across the whole ecosystem. And I know some folks here right now, like you've been talking
on these topics before and I know we've had conversation and I know you're having those
conversations with other folks too. So I'm really excited for that to continue happening
and just making sure that the future of DSCI
is really being designed in a way that is additive
in a positive way to science and for scientists as well.
So with that, I want to be appreciative and conscious of everyone's time as we've wrapped up for the hour for this conversation.
And we'll be back again next week. how that really is an essential technological component
in DSCI and just different potential applications
of what that can look like actually being built out
into different DSCI products.
So if you're working in that space or know someone else
who might be a really great voice addition into that conversation,
please connect us with them. And we'd love to have them come up on stage and really explore
that topic. And then moving forward into the upcoming weeks, if there's another topic that
you would like to see explored or that you would like to lead, please reach out on that as
well. And we'd love to get that scheduled out and just make sure that this is an open mic space to
explore what's important to the broader DSi ecosystem and be a platform that is useful for
all of us. So thank you to everyone who has joined in and really looking forward to
continuing conversation on this topic of onboarding scientists into DSci and all of the many other
topics we have yet to keep exploring within just how DSci can advance science and make the world better.
Thank you. I'll see you next time.
Thanks, Aaron. Yeah, this has been really great.
