Community Curation

In bottom-up community curation, curation communities (journals, scientific societies, etc.) define explicit curation criteria, and any piece of work that meets those criteria is automatically curated: There's no final bottleneck decision-maker. This allows for more explicit quality standards, and implies that communities may also benefit from validation signal generated by actors outside of the community: For example, a community may define Open Data as a necessary curation criterion, benefit from the validation services of other communities by curating any Node with the according verified Attestation.

You can apply to join the Community MVP now to create your own curation community on DeSci Nodes.

View Curated Nodes

To view Nodes curated by communities on DeSci Nodes, check the Browse page and make sure you've selected Browse by Community. You can filter curated Nodes by selecting a community. Once selected, the Feed will update to show only Nodes that have been curated by this community. You will also see a short description and some keywords per community, making it easier to know which Feeds to pay attention to, based on your own interests. You can also view a community's Curated Nodes list from their Community Home.

Curation Criteria

Each curation community on DeSci Nodes selects a set of Attestations as their curation criteria. This means that any Node claiming this set of Attestations will appear as a submission on the community's Radar. From here, members can review the Node and choose to verify the claimed attestations based on the content of the claiming Node. Once every Attestation within the curation criteria has been validated by at least one person, the Node is automatically curated into the Curated Nodes list.

Current Limitations of the Curation Functionality

In order to keep things simple, communities right now are able to select which Attestations need to be verified in order for a Node to be curated into their feed. Communities are currently not able to define whose verification signal to count, meaning that verifications from actors outside of the community may lead to a Node getting curated by the community. This may be beneficial, as the community gets to benefit from work done by others, but it may also lead to unwanted curations as well as fake verifications with malicious intent. This is a limitation we are aware of and will address in the future releases of this feature.

Communities are currently also not able to create their own Attestations. They will be able to do so very soon with our upcoming Attestation Manager.

Visions Around Curation

Our vision for scientific curation is one with the broadest design space possible, in order to allow for communities to create the quality standards and mechanisms that best represent and advance their values and purpose. This means that communities will not only be able to define their own Attestations, but also granularly set curation thresholds for each of them. They will be able to decide how many verifications any attestation needs in order for the Node to be eligible for curation, and set explicit rules for whose verificaiton signal to count in the first place. For some Attestations the public signal may be informative, while for others you may trust only a small set of people's opinions. Communities can also use OR conditions to define the set of Attestations in the curation criteria.