Blockchain For Science Con 2018 : “Building the Open Science Ecosystem of the Future”
After a series of meetups and unconferences we felt strong enough to call for the First International conference on Blockchain For Science, Research and Knowledge creation. Luckily, the long planned dates fell together with the Berlin Science week.
We invited people from our network, wrote cold contact invitations to all research institutes in Germany, most of Europe and America. We approached many sponsors, most uttered scepticism towards the topic or us organizing a first year conference, both completely understandable as Blockchain was overhyping and some shady ICO-scams made the news.
During the two days, 120 people attended. There have been people from literally all over the world, including Australia, New Zealand, South America, Turkey, the States, Russia, Belarus, just to name a few. Furthermore, there have been developers, blockchain coders, real world scientists, librarians, publishers, lawyers, investors and about 10 Blockchain For Science projects. We created the diversity that is right for this field. However, there is also a room to grow, in the future we will try to include more institutes, politicians, policy makers and IoT-providers. I believe that us showing that we are willingly to open up our content and that we try to bring the stakeholder together, will make it easier to approach institutes and sponsors in the future.
The topics ranged from basic intro to Blockchain, through infrastructure, as well as publishing on the blockchain and decentralized data infrastructure. Prof. Dirnagl as one of the first speakers, completely destroyed the prospects of Blockchain and how it could fix things in science and research. From this we rose like the Phoenix from the ashes during the upcoming two days. And we have shown clearly, that we are not naive regarding the prospects of blockchain technology — important in the (post-)hype phase of a technology. Clearly, the emerging cryptoeconomy for science was too short and there is much more need to discuss and follow up on, which we will do through out 2019 (Check out upcoming events, most notably Seed2019 soon in Davos). The decentralized data panel resulted in a great discussion.
So what is Blockchain in Science?
Blockchain in Science references not only the infrastructure, and here a consortium chain (permissioned, permissionless), or proof-of-authority (how they are called today), is certainly the right way to go for many applications, including publishing, peer-reviewing, social networking, all science communication. But Blockchain in Science are also new data handling paradigms, new deals on data, new ways to proof privacy of research data, and the whole cryptoeconomy for science. New ways to distribute research money. And to reduce overhead in science conduct through DAOs and other emerging organization forms. Or the social physics of ideas flow supported through completely new economies. Furthermore, ideally it is completely decentralized Web 3.0 infrastructure for science — even beyond current repositories and centralized databases, may they be as open as they are at the moment. So it is really a wide field. This was my personal intention that this was a clear take home message after the first day.
Despite the vivid discussions, we just begun to address many things. Researcher identity is not solved. Furthermore, how do we incentivise projects to work on a decentralised infrastructure if there is no prospect to cash out on the attention economy and the control over data? This holds true for institutes as well — because in the future they might not be visible as the enabler to grant distributing authorities anymore in the same way they are today. Furthermore, it shows that Blockchain For Science is really suprainstitutional, and potentially more open than current open science. It needs rethinking on many levels.
The International Society of Blockchain For Science was only briefly discussed. It is in the structuring phase and we will come up with a disputable proposal of what it should do during the first half of 2019 — sorry for the delay, but we wanted not to have just another, empty organizational structure, but a clear path to go.
Blockchain For Science Con 2019: New deals
Concluding: The first step is done, it was a success, and we will continue. There will be a Blockchain For Science Con 2019 — most likely in begin of November — that is for sure. The key topics will be: New deals on data and on Science (Cryptoeconomy). It will be more low-key, as open as this one and we hope that we can welcome you there. Furthermore, we are open to any suggestions.
Thanks to all the contributors, and Arnoud de Kemp, who helped us a lot with the how-tos to make such an event happening.
Last but not least — There was a graffiti
The whole conference was in rather unusual setting, a music artsy hotel — bridging the Kreuzberg / Brooklyn backyard blockchain culture with rather established scientific conference locations … :) All crowned by a graffiti of one of the most famous Berlin street artists — Tobo. If you want to read more on it, click here.
Program with links to the talks on youtube
Day 1: On to the journey …
Welcome
(Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Schildhauer)
Status of Science and Knowledge Creation
- How to reduce Waste and improve Value in biomedical Research (And why the Blockchain won´t help)
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Dirnagl, Director, Department of Experimental Neurology, Charité, Berlin - Open Science
Dr. Jon Tennant, Rogue scientist, Founder of the Open Science MOOC - Why we need to seed blockchain in research: crisis and opportunities for collaboration
Dr. Aleksandra Sokolowska, Head of Research and Analytics, Validitylabs & Project lead Seed2019
Blockchain For Science and Knowledge Creation
- What is DLT? What is Blockchain? What is Bitcoin? And what is decentralization?
Prof. Dr. Ali Sunyaev, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) - Blockchain: From its (scalability) limitations to the internet of blockchains
Ismail Khoffi, Tendermint - Immutable research data trail
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bela Gipp, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz - Panel: What is Blockchain (in Science) ? Panel Participants: Prof. Bela Gipp, Prof. Ali Sunyaev, Ismail Khoffi, Mo Dong (celer.network), Lambert Heller, Sönke Bartling (lead) …
Research Data & Blockchain
- Decentralized research data: Overview
Denis Parfenov, Founder of DaMaHub. - New deals on data: Generating open knowledge on closed data
Prof. Dr Konrad Förstner, ZB MED — Information Centre for Life Sciences, Cologne, Germany and TH Köln, Cologne, Germany - Ocean protocol (for research data)
Dimitri de Jonghe, Head of research (BigchainDB) and co-founder at Ocean Protocol - Panel: Decentralized Research Data Data discussion Karmen Čondić-Jurkić(lead), Denis Parfenov, Prof. Dr. Konrad Förstner, Dimitri de Jonghe, James Littlejohn
Making Blockchain work for the Open Science Ecosystem
- Open Technology and Blockchain in Life Sciences
Jim Nasr, Vice President, Technology & Innovation at Synchrogenix, a Certara company - Identifying Identities: ORCID, Identities and the Blockchain
Robert Peters, Technical Director, ORCID.org - Creating trust all the way down to the data acquistion ? — Blockchain connection of the Io(R)T — Internet of Research things, Massimiliano Picone, Founder at Fermi.xyz — Cosmic Blockchain Solutions
Pre-Dinner Thoughts….
- Research Culture — Keynote: Look for the outliers and not the mean OR Stories can wait: Blockchain secured Micrcontributions
Prof. Dr. Lawrence Rajendran, Founder and CEO of ScienceMatters and EUREKA, Institute of Regenerative Medicine, University of Zürich - Space-Keynote: The Social and Economic Fabric of Decentralized Space Development,
Yalda Mousavinia, Co-Founder Space Cooperative - The Keynote-Keynote: A mathematical Description of Knowledge
Bartmoss St. Clair, Senior AI Researcher at Samsung
Day 2:
Scientific Publishing on the Blockchain
- Keynote: Peer-Review on the Blockchain
Dr. Joris van Rossum, Digital Science, London & Alex Tran Qui, Katalysis - The future of indexing and secondary publishing: A blockchain based approach
Dave Kochalko , cofounder Artifacts - P2P perspectives: Let’s connect the dots, agree on standards — and talk about it
Lambert Heller, TIB Hannover - Distributed data protection and copyright on the blockchain and in decentralized future
Alexandra Giannopoulou, Postdoctoral Researcher, Blockchain and Society Policy Lab, Institute for Information Law (IViR)
Cryptoeconomy for Science
- Overview of the Crypto- and Token Economy
Evgenia Filippova, Senior Scientist at the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics, Vienna Univerity of Economics - How can tokens and crypto assets be used to fund research?
Prof. Dr. Philipp Sandner, Head of the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management - Crypto-economy for science: automated grants distribution models
Alex Shkor, Founder of DEIP.World - Legal Aspects for ICOs for Research Projects
Dr. Nina-Luisa Siedler, Partner, DFW Germany Rechtsanwalts ges.mbH
Specific applications
- Keynote token bonding and curation markets: Exploring Curation Markets for Drug Discovery — Introducing Molecule Protocol
Paul Kohlhaas, Founder & CEO of Linum Labs - Accelerating genomic data generation and facilitating genomic data sharing through blockchain-enabled decentralization
Dennis Grishin, Co-Founder Nebula Genomics - NoK(ing) on Heavens Door: Global Decentralised Adaptive Platform for Collaborative Scientific Discovery
Roman Gonitel, NoK Founder - Frankl: Open Science on the Blockchain, Jon Brock from Frankl Open Science
From Organised and Incentivised Collaboration to IP (Intellectual Property) and other real world connections
- Keynote: Research-DAO
Dr. Martin Etzrodt, Principal Researcher Akasha Foundation
Building the Open Science Ecosystem of the Future
- Buidling the Open Science Ecosystem: Status
Prof.Dr. Sascha Friesike, Free University of Amsterdam and Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin & Benedikt Fecher, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin - ALL: Open Panel / Discussion
Poster prices
Two poster prices were selected by the committee:
Price serendipity:
Price serious business:
Congrats to the winners!
