Overview
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.
Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- The proposal identifies limitations in DeSci systems design, including ad hoc flowcharts with informal ontologies and a lack of engineering-grade standards.
- It argues agent-based methods are needed to move design from bulk or mean-field approaches to the granularity of single actions by particular entities.
- It lays out tentative milestones beginning with entity model construction within 4 months of funding, budgeted at $20,000.
- The authors acknowledge a risk that the entity ontology may not yield results favoring the Hypercert mechanism.
Methods
- Proposed AEOS specification and Active Blockference models for Hypercerts — The proposal plans to build an Active Entity Ontology for Science (AEOS) specification and Active Blockference implementation for Hypercert ecosystems.
- Planned extension of Active Blockference to multi-agent simulation — Plans to expand the currently single-agent Active Blockference simulation into a multi-agent model of Hypercert ecosystems.
- Planned informative stakeholder interviews — The research strategy begins with interviews with Protocol Labs, Hypercert developers and stakeholders before milestone development.
- Planned comparative simulations of funding models — A milestone deliverable is comparable simulations of traditional, DeSci and Hypercert funding models.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
Document downloads
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- 2022_HypercertEcosystems.pdf PDF · 0.07 MiB · extracted-text source
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