The Open Technology Initiative

Uniting Global Scientific Progress through Blockchain Technology

Politically Motivated Software utilizing blockchain technology to help assist in removing barriers from open participation and direct involvement in advancing science and technology and bringing Humanitarian change to a global society.

Can the scientific method be implemented through software (i.e. smart contracts)?

This project aims to create a decentralized autonomous non-profit organization with a goal to unite scientific and technological progress for a global society. We plan to develop a variety of important scientific resources, that hold the promise to become the idealized and centralized datastores used freely by anyone worldwide.

Incentivizing Development of Open-Source Resources

This structure will utilize new smart contract, DAO and blockchain based technologies to incentivize the creation and management of merkle tree data structures to organize and index many important datasets that can be utilized by the world community.

This organization will focus on funding the development, implementation, and distribution of a variety of projects in the following fields: open source software, open hardware, scientific and laboratory equipment, educational resources for all ages, and the generation and maintenance of databases of scientific information such as organisms, chemicals, with a ideal similar to the opengenome project.

Uniting Global Scientific Resources

These indexes would include, but not limited to; all biological life and organism that exists and have been documented and observed, either living or archeological, mineral and chemical databases, spectral data, software defined radio data, genetic information, all inclusive sound and video archives, even indexes of all existing websites.

Each index will have an interface similar to wikipedia and be collaboratively operated by a community formed autonomously through consensus based trust hierarchies.

The egalitarian and non-profit basis of this foundation hopes to create a new, transparent and 100% directly consensually run organization for the progression and advancement of science and technology for the betterment of humanity. This will be the first open source software and hardware organization run completely by the developers and maintainers of the the system directly, with all decisions of the community directly agreed upon by the community. This aims to create the ideal, modern and transparent alternative organization to the previous structures which are flawed in being limited to a certain geographic area, in addition the limit of their transparency is in the trust of individuals to maintain this transparency. By creating an organization where all actions are directly proposed and enforced through an open blockchain can be fully audited by anyone in the world by simply observing the blockchain. Through the action of having all records permanently and immutably online, many individuals will inspect and scrutinize these records, this service will also be performed by many of the invested members of the organization around the world through the course of operation, as certain as people will suspect the systems integrity, we will have people analyze the scrutinize every aspect of the operations of this organization, as its very radical nature is highly disruptive in itself.

Current Prospected Framework Technology

Current speculative Technological backbone of this project is IPFS and the Ethereum network, dependent on projected space and computing constraints, which might demand an alternative blockchain system, either using a tuned proof-of-work system with less security in exchange for greater computational speed and space efficiency, or a competing architecture such as proof-of-stake. This would be a valid reason to find an alternative blockchain network to Ethereum, or to create a distinct Fork the Ethereum software tuned for efficiency and data throughput, not necessarily speed. Reduced Block times, of say, one hour per block, or even as much as one day, might be seen as advantageous for certain datasets.

Prior Work

This project is based on previously unpublished work on an autonomous open source science project written by the author. This project is inspired by many other collaborative projects, including Wikipedia, the OpenEdX project, the GVCS project, and many others. P2P technology developed over the past 20 years has shown millions of users the power of group computing projects and file sharing as an alternative to previous, central server based web-hosting and even distributed, multi-server technology such as enabled by cloud based content distribution networks, such as Amazon AWS or others. Blockchain based Distributed Ledger technology, as introduced by Bitcoin, holds the promise of enabling censorship resistant networks that can be hardened through an architecture that ensures it is virtually impossible that any given organization or government has the ability to compromise the network through traditional means. The creation of general-purpose, blockchain based, 'singleton' computing, an idea explicitly introduced with Ethereum, has the promise to enable further radical and unstoppable online structures. Ethereum provides the facilities for programmers to use the blockchain as a framework or backbone for further developments. Ethereum has also brought to the table, for the first time in computing, a discrete and secure, time-stamped, record of every action this distributed computer has ever computed, creating a transparent global singleton computer.

I feel that this project captures the zeitgeist of the times and represent the trend the internet is heading towards. These are exciting times to live in, hopefully the next twenty years of computing technology will be as productive for society and technology as the prior twenty years, and not as tools of oppression and control.

Alexander Countey

Open Questions:

What systems are required to enable this system? What requirements are needed to create this collective?

How do we form the trust networks required to begin?

Can the ideals of this organization be written in code?

Is the Ethereum's smart-contract language advanced enough to implement this organization effectively?

Is Ethereum flawed beyond recovery? Therefore, should it not be considered as a framework for this project?

Does anyone in the world know how to write an un-hackable smart contract?

Is a hard fork not a perversion of the blockchain, but consensus maximus?

Can we develop a Soft and Hard-Fork resistant network to insure the immutability of the blockchain is maintained above all else?
Are there existing non-profit structures already existing in smart contract code?

What physical form will this organization take, if any?

Will this organization have a location in the physical world?

Is a location a requirement of a new ‘DAO’ based organization?

Does access to computing technology limit this project to wealthy nations and potentially restrict developing countries from equal and fair participation?

What agricultural technologies could this project potentially develop?

Can this project improve the lives of people living in worlds lower economic strata?

Can humanitarian efforts create the socio-economic incentive to develop necessary and vital technologies without restriction by proprietary licenses or patents, that only serve to increase costs and restrict unhampered use of a given technology?

How can micropayment's distributed by decentralized democratic organizations subsidize the development and distribution of open source software, tools, and educational and research resources to a global audience?