Hey Algoverians,
This week, we’ve changed around the way we give updates to our community. We decided it makes more sense to use video calls for more socially-oriented events, where we can get as much input from the community as possible. For this reason, we’ll give Town Hall updates in the form of a 15 minute pre-recorded video from now on. This will contain the same information as the newsletter, for those that prefer their information in video format. We’re also launching new weekly events for discussing and socialising on Thursdays in our reading group at Algovera HQ (more on that below). We have a busy week of events coming up.
The Algovera-LYNX hackathon starts later this week, with kick-off events on Friday 11th March and hacking commencing on Saturday 12th March 9 am UTC. Today is the last day to sign up. The kick-off will include 45 minutes of talks and orientation and the an optional social after hosted on Gathertown. We're running two identical sessions to accommodate the different time zones (10am UTC and 5pm UTC). We'll circulate a few more details about the hack this week, including invites for a couple more talks over the event. In the meantime, please drop by the #-neuroscience channel our Discord to ask any questions!
We’re hosting a workshop on Data Science DAOs at Open Data Governance Jam by NEAR Protocol and Governauts. The aim is to explore governance problems & solutions for data, with discussions focused around the recent paper “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) as Data Trusts: A general-purpose data governance framework for decentralised data ownership, storage, and utilisation” by Kelsie Nabben (link). A big part of Web3 is rewarding users for any data that they provide and this is awesome. However, raw data also needs to be processed to extract insights and make predictions, which increases the value of the data and rewards to users. This suggests that data scientists still have a big role to play. Tune in to hear how we think data science DAOs and data DAOs need to coordinate.
We are excited to announce that we opened our headquarters in... the metaverse! We are experimenting with Gather.town to create a virtual space for our community. The hope is that virtual spaces can allow people to form stronger connections than Zoom calls. Algovera HQ will be a space to meet other members, have conversations, host events (e.g Hackathons), and more. We are also considering ideas like giving dedicated space to teams within the Algovera ecosystem such as Squads and Pods. Algovera HQ is still under renovation but you can join and explore using this link.
We held a short guided tour around our offices last week before diving into our first reading group meeting, which took place around the campfire in the garden. To start, we had a good discussion on the paper that we’ll be jamming on at Open Data Gov. Next week, we’ll be discussing a framework called "Active Inference" applied to collaboration in remote teams: “Active Inference & Behavior Engineering for Teams” by Active Inference Lab (link). It sounds complicated, but actually the paper is pretty accessible. We’d love for you to join and hear what you think! You can RSVP to the event in the #☕-reading-group channel of our Discord.
It’s the last day of voting in OceanDAO. This round, we were granted a core tech earmark our plan to work towards first-class integration with a data science platform (HuggingFace). Since no one else applied for the core tech earmark this month, it means that we are guaranteed some but not all funding (assuming we get more yes than no votes). Don’t forget to vote if you hold Ocean tokens!
We are very pleased to announce that we have now spun up a DAO for each of our Squads on DAOhaus and completed the first round of payments. We’ve created a video walkthrough playlist on our YouTube channel to get our Squads up to speed on using the platform.
We recently published our Jupyter Lab extension that integrates MetaMask. The idea for this came from running our first series of hacking sessions for the generative art project. In the corresponding notebooks, there was quite a bit of code needed to perform actions like initialising wallets, buying data tokens and signing transactions. This tool simplifies the workflow, and greatly reduces the number of lines of code, for downloading datasets from the Ocean marketplace and running compute jobs. For more information, check out the demo video that we put together to showcase the functionality.
We kicked off two new working groups last week, with the Design and Privacy Pods holding their first meetings. The aim of the former is to build on the results by Arpit from our bounty in the Indian Ocean Hackathon to come up with a complete design for Algovera’s AI marketplace. The goal of the Privacy Pod is to align efforts of Algovera with our partner projects - Healthcare Data Guild (mnkyntigr and Dave), FELToken (Breta and Filip), Bubble Protocol (Dave) - to incorporate more private AI tools (e.g. some Openmined software) with the Ocean marketplace. We are also starting up a Reputation Pod this week, to keep track of and reward contributions from the Algovera community. Reach out in the #😍-design #🔒-private-ai and #💫-reputation channels if you’re interested in taking part.