Nature of Trust

On Trust Infrastructure Trust underpins civilisation. It expands the scope and complexity of the pursuits within our collective reach by allowing us to act as a…

On Relational Infrastructure

Exploring the role of relationships, trust and mutualistic approaches to change.

Why Should I Trust You?

News Commentary Podcast · Updated Weekly · Bold, unfiltered, and uncompromisingly honest, Why Should I Trust You?  is a weekly podcast that looks at the breakdown in trust for science and public health. It drops every Thursday, with occasional…

Connecting Research with Community - Civic Innovation Lab

Welcome to Civic Innovation Lab, where we drive social impact through collaborative solutions and empower communities. Join us in fostering sustainable development, co-creating initiatives, and advancing inclusive governance for a better future.

The Fourth Theory of Agent Trust: Emergence - Astral's Blog

Welcome to the Web of Trust

Empowering individuals to co-create decentralized systems for lasting mutual benefit.

A Vision of Metascience

How does the culture of science change and improve? Many people have identified shortcomings in core social processes of science, such as peer review, how grants are awarded, how people are selected to become scientists, and so on. Yet despite often compelling criticisms, strong barriers inhibit widespread change in such social processes. The result is near stasis, and apathy about the prospects for improvement. People sometimes start new research institutions intended to do things differently; unfortunately such institutions are often changed more by the existing ecosystem than they change it. In this essay we sketch a vision of how the social processes of science may be rapidly improved. In this vision, metascience plays a key role: it deepens our understanding of which social processes best support discovery; that understanding can then help drive change. We introduce the notion of a metascience entrepreneur, a person seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science. We argue that: (1) metascience is an imaginative design practice, exploring an enormous design space for social processes; (2) that exploration aims to find new social processes which unlock latent potential for discovery; (3) decentralized change must be possible, so outsiders with superior ideas can't be blocked by established power centers; (4) ideally, change would align with what is best for science and for humanity, not merely what is fashionable, politically popular, or media-friendly; (5) the net result would be a far more structurally diverse set of environments for doing science; and (6) this would enable crucial types of work difficult or impossible within existing environments. For this vision to succeed metascience must develop and intertwine three elements: an imaginative design practice, an entrepreneurial discipline, and a research field. Overall, it is a vision in which metascience is an engine of improvement for the social processes and ultimately the culture of science.

Open Social Network Cookbook

The Open Social Network Cookbook is the collective product of the Open Social Incubator, a cohort that MEDLab hosted from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025. At the heart of our work together was the question: How can the online communities that we participate in use tools that truly reflect our values?

LinkedTrust — Deep Tech. Human Trust.

Verified trust systems, civic tech platforms, and AI-powered tools. Real projects, real impact.

Creating Scientific Theories with Online Communities using Gut Instinct

People's lived experiences provide intuitions about their health. Can they transform these personal intuitions into scientific theories that inform both science and their lives? My research introduces social computing architectures and system principles for people to brainstorm and test causal scientific theories. These ideas are instantiated in the Gut Instinct system (gutinstinct.ucsd.edu). 344 voluntary online participants from 27 countries created 399 personally-relevant questions about the human microbiome, 75 (19%) of which microbiome experts found potentially scientifically novel. To test their theories, end users design structurally-sound experiments, improve them via community reviews, and run them with other participants. Controlled experiments show that participants create better hypotheses and experimental designs when they have access to procedural training. My research illustrates a novel way to tackle complex, creative tasks online by building expertise in online volunteer communities.

Launching openRxiv Labs - openRxiv

Over the last thirteen years, bioRxiv and medRxiv have grown into widely used infrastructure for rapid research sharing in biology and medicine. The reliability and researcher-first values that have defined these platforms since their founding remain central to how we operate, and building on the trust, partnerships, and community relationships researchers worldwide depend on is…

Why we don’t really know what the public thinks about science

Measuring trust isn’t enough. Furthering knowledge about the institutions and norms of science is the best way to build credibility.

Have people stopped trusting science? The data tell a surprising story

Some say there’s a global crisis of trust — but research reveals where the real problems lie.

Civic Health Project

Technology can connect or divide us. At Civic Health Project, we're dedicated to advancing massively scalable solutions to society's dangerous divisions.

Trust Revolution

Unfiltered conversations with builders, thinkers, and operators in Bitcoin and beyond. Exploring systems we trust, why they work (or don't), and what's next.