DeSci

Duration: March 2025 – June 2025
Team: Katherine Skinner and Emma Green
Skillset: Governance Model Development, Strategic Planning

Overview

For most open infrastructure, governance often emerges gradually as a community grows and starts asking hard questions. DeSci Foundation wanted those questions answered before CODEX launched.

CODEX is a decentralized data storage protocol for scholarly communication, designed with censorship resistance and durability at its core. When DeSci Foundation started preparing to transition CODEX out of DeSci Labs and into a not-for-profit environment, they faced a question that's easier to ask than to answer: how do you build governance that the scholarly community will actually trust, especially when the underlying technology, Blockchain, is one many of them are sceptical about?

They wanted to get that right from the start, before launch rather than after.

What we did

DeSci Foundation had a clear vision for what CODEX should become. What they needed was an outside view on how to get there, and a structured process for hearing from the people whose trust would matter most.

We started by mapping CODEX's emerging governance approach against existing open-source frameworks, particularly the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), to identify where the protocol aligned and what principles needed to be embedded from the start. Then we went directly to stakeholders: People from across the scholarly communication ecosystem, including representatives from universities, funders, metadata and standards bodies, open scholarly infrastructures, and scientific compute infrastructures.

What we heard was consistent in some ways and surprising in others. Transparency ranked as the unanimous priority across every group. Stakeholders wanted clear protection of openness built into the governance structure, and they wanted the governance body focused on a specific set of responsibilities: managing licenses and rights, overseeing technical decisions, and having a clear plan for what happens if the protocol ever needs to wind down.

We also heard direct skepticism about blockchain technology itself. A number of stakeholders cited concerns about transaction culture and the commodification of research. That feedback shaped the governance framework as much as anything else. The framework we developed with DeSci Foundation starts with an appointed governance body focused on the priorities stakeholders identified, with built-in mechanisms for transitioning to elected leadership as the community grows. Transparency and protection of openness are structural features, not aspirations.

Outcomes and impact

DeSci Foundation came into this engagement with a protocol ready to launch and governance that needed to catch up. They left with a framework grounded in community input and mapped to established open principles, a clearer understanding of where trust barriers exist and how governance design can address them, and a documented model that other organizations building open scholarly infrastructure can learn from.

As Philipp Koellinger, CEO of DeSci Labs AG and President of DeSci Foundation, put it: "We knew from the beginning that CODEX needed robust governance. IOI's stakeholder needs assessment revealed insights we wouldn't have uncovered on our own. Their work helped us design a governance framework that addresses community concerns head-on while staying true to our vision of truly open, decentralized scholarly infrastructure."

The work also surfaces something worth naming for the broader field. Blockchain skepticism in scholarly communication is real and legitimate, and governance design is one of the few levers available to address it directly. How a protocol is structured, who holds decision-making authority, and what safeguards exist against future closure or commercialization are all things the community watches closely. Getting those answers in place early is not just good practice. It is what determines whether a new infrastructure earns a seat in the ecosystem or not.

Building something new? Start with governance.

New open infrastructure has a difficult job: it needs to earn trust from communities that have seen platforms start well and drift. The earlier you build governance that reflects community needs, the better your chances of being one that doesn't.

If you're launching new infrastructure and want support to design appropriate governance, or if you're a funder trying to understand what good governance looks like before you invest, we'd be glad to talk through what that work may involve.

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“We knew from the beginning that CODEX needed robust governance. IOI's stakeholder needs assessment revealed insights we wouldn't have uncovered on our own. Their work helped us design a governance framework that addresses community concerns head-on while staying true to our vision of truly open, decentralized scholarly infrastructure.”

— Philipp Koellinger, CEO of DeSci Labs AG and President of DeSci Foundation