Introducing CAIROS: Collective Augmented Intelligence for Research and Open Science

New year, new initiatives!

Continue below for an overview, or see the publication with the slides and abstract.

Scientific communities are straining under mounting challenges—knowledge fragmentation, outdated publication processes, institutional erosion and funding cuts that threaten our capacity to address urgent global problems. Current incentives are driving scarcity and individual competition rather than the open knowledge sharing and large scale collaboration we need in order to overcome the “science polycrisis”.

Transformative technologies like AI and open social networks stand to play a pivotal role in the next phase of science: on one hand, they create unprecedented possibilities for addressing information overload and empowering collaborative research.

On the other hand, they also bring unprecedented risks of “slop science”, power centralization, and community fragmentation.

These challenges and opportunities call for new ways of organizing research, fundamentally reimagining how it's created, who can participate, how it is disseminated, and how the value generated from research is distributed

Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or critical moment for words, action or movement.

CAIROS is our attempt to meet this moment, by integrating three innovations at the metascience frontier. The first two will be familiar to readers of the blog, the third is more CAIROS-specific.

Modular research, exemplified by initiatives like Continuous Science Foundation, Nanopublications and Discourse Graphs, is about unpacking the research process into machine readable, composable “knowledge units” like questions, claims, and evidence. Where traditional research has turned into a monoculture that recognizes only publications, modular research unlocks a new kind of “permaculture science” which recognizes diverse contributions, empowers citizen science and enables grassroots, distributed large-scale collaboration.

Modular research is great in theory, but a central challenge remains how to gain widespread adoption. Science social media provides a key piece to the incentive puzzle. Researchers on social media, when they share questions, recommendations or critiques, are engaging in modular research already, they just don’t know it yet. The problem is that current social platforms are not designed for science, so those insights too often get lost in the noise or enclosed by data hungry platforms.

The good news is that we’re at a unique moment where open social networks like Bluesky are seeing huge popularity gains with scientists. And we can go even further than that - open platforms are built on open protocols like ActivityPub and ATProtocol, which are inherently extensible and enable the creation of whole new kinds of social media tailored for research. When effectively federated, these protocols and tools have the potential to unlock new forms of participation and knowledge sharing that doesn’t happen on traditional platforms.

Examples include our Semble and other ATProto Science projects, and Bonfire’s Open Science Network on the Fediverse.

We recognize that systemic change will require organizational and not just technical innovations.

We take inspiration from works like Samuel Moore’s excellent book Publishing Beyond the Market. Moore makes the case for commons as a third way beyond purely commercial, governmental or philanthropic models - a mode of production grounded in collective self-organization and self-reliance.

We view cooperative federation as a promising path towards implementing open and sustainable research commons. Cooperative approaches empower democratic governance, prioritize collective progress over individual competition, and unlock new forms of equitable data stewardship such as data cooperatives.

The idea of collective intelligence is central to our initiative. AI-centric approaches focus on wholesale task automation and risk automating humans out of the loop. In contrast, collective intelligence systems are designed for virtuous cycles where AI and humans improve each other recursively, thus preserving and empowering human agency

To give a sense of what we mean by virtuous cycles - imagine new social networks that incentivize participation and elicit authentic knowledge sharing, tools that structure this thinking into modular units, and hybrid human-AI systems powered by that data to support next generation curation, discovery and synthesis:

Cooperative governance at the center is what keeps the cycle spinning and humans in the loop. It maintains human oversight across all components and ensures value is reinvested back into the ecosystem. This keeps the entire cycle aligned with research communities rather than extractive interests.

Collective intelligence isn't just about improving collective knowledge work: as explored by the Collective Intelligence Project, CI also enables and requires transformative new business models.

If you’re interested in joining the movement to create collectively owned research commons, please reach out at https://forms.cairos.network/connect or hello@cairos.network

Whether you're building open science projects or communities, contributing as a researcher, or funders exploring how to support this transformation - we’d love to hear from you!

Continue below for an overview, or see the publication with the slides and abstract.

Scientific communities are straining under mounting challenges—knowledge fragmentation, outdated publication processes, institutional erosion and funding cuts that threaten our capacity to address urgent global problems. Current incentives are driving scarcity and individual competition rather than the open knowledge sharing and large scale collaboration we need in order to overcome the “science polycrisis”.

Transformative technologies like AI and open social networks stand to play a pivotal role in the next phase of science: on one hand, they create unprecedented possibilities for addressing information overload and empowering collaborative research.

On the other hand, they also bring unprecedented risks of “slop science”, power centralization, and community fragmentation.

These challenges and opportunities call for new ways of organizing research, fundamentally reimagining how it's created, who can participate, how it is disseminated, and how the value generated from research is distributed

Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or critical moment for words, action or movement.

CAIROS is our attempt to meet this moment, by integrating three innovations at the metascience frontier. The first two will be familiar to readers of the blog, the third is more CAIROS-specific.

Modular research, exemplified by initiatives like Continuous Science Foundation, Nanopublications and Discourse Graphs, is about unpacking the research process into machine readable, composable “knowledge units” like questions, claims, and evidence. Where traditional research has turned into a monoculture that recognizes only publications, modular research unlocks a new kind of “permaculture science” which recognizes diverse contributions, empowers citizen science and enables grassroots, distributed large-scale collaboration.

Modular research is great in theory, but a central challenge remains how to gain widespread adoption. Science social media provides a key piece to the incentive puzzle. Researchers on social media, when they share questions, recommendations or critiques, are engaging in modular research already, they just don’t know it yet. The problem is that current social platforms are not designed for science, so those insights too often get lost in the noise or enclosed by data hungry platforms.

The good news is that we’re at a unique moment where open social networks like Bluesky are seeing huge popularity gains with scientists. And we can go even further than that - open platforms are built on open protocols like ActivityPub and ATProtocol, which are inherently extensible and enable the creation of whole new kinds of social media tailored for research. When effectively federated, these protocols and tools have the potential to unlock new forms of participation and knowledge sharing that doesn’t happen on traditional platforms.

Examples include our Semble and other ATProto Science projects, and Bonfire’s Open Science Network on the Fediverse.

We recognize that systemic change will require organizational and not just technical innovations.

We take inspiration from works like Samuel Moore’s excellent book Publishing Beyond the Market. Moore makes the case for commons as a third way beyond purely commercial, governmental or philanthropic models - a mode of production grounded in collective self-organization and self-reliance.

We view cooperative federation as a promising path towards implementing open and sustainable research commons. Cooperative approaches empower democratic governance, prioritize collective progress over individual competition, and unlock new forms of equitable data stewardship such as data cooperatives.

The idea of collective intelligence is central to our initiative. AI-centric approaches focus on wholesale task automation and risk automating humans out of the loop. In contrast, collective intelligence systems are designed for virtuous cycles where AI and humans improve each other recursively, thus preserving and empowering human agency

To give a sense of what we mean by virtuous cycles - imagine new social networks that incentivize participation and elicit authentic knowledge sharing, tools that structure this thinking into modular units, and hybrid human-AI systems powered by that data to support next generation curation, discovery and synthesis:

Cooperative governance at the center is what keeps the cycle spinning and humans in the loop. It maintains human oversight across all components and ensures value is reinvested back into the ecosystem. This keeps the entire cycle aligned with research communities rather than extractive interests.

Collective intelligence isn't just about improving collective knowledge work: as explored by the Collective Intelligence Project, CI also enables and requires transformative new business models.

If you’re interested in joining the movement to create collectively owned research commons, please reach out at https://forms.cairos.network/connect or hello@cairos.network

Whether you're building open science projects or communities, contributing as a researcher, or funders exploring how to support this transformation - we’d love to hear from you!