Systems Modeling and Cognitive Audits for Hypercert Ecosystems

On August 24th 2022, Holke Brammer of Protocol Labs released a blog “Hypercerts: A new primitive for public goods funding” describing how “Hypercerts” could be used for Decentralized Science (DeSci). With collaborators at the Active Inference Institute, we have been developing frameworks and tools for applied Active Inference, in the context of Remote Teams & DeSci, specifically highlighting the intersection of Active Inference and Systems Engineering as realized in our open source package Active Blockference. Our 2022 DeSci paper introduced an Active Entity Ontology for Science (AEOS), which describes how entities of different types develop and interact within and across system scales (e.g. two people communicating, within a DAO that scaffolds scientific peer review, that is paid via funding from a research agency). We aim to develop the Hypercert ecosystem towards flexibility, utility, and maturity by creating an AEOS specification, and Active Blockference implementation, for Hypercerts. We aim to develop the tooling, use cases (case studies), and educational resources that enable a cognitive audit of Hypercert protocols. The addition of this cognitive layer into the Hypercert development stack will facilitate trust and reliability, thus maximizing the value of projects. This AEOS implementation would enable anticipatory design and realtime analysis of Hypercert ecosystems, at the granularity required for high-reliability systems design. Such an implementation may build on intuition, by demonstrating areas where Hypercerts may be superior to other funding mechanisms, as well as areas where it may not be effective.

Overview source: Curated paper metadata.