About AI Internet-Meritocracy in 2026

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AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM) is World Science DAO’s flagship project for experimenting with AI-assisted, merit-based funding of science and free and open-source software. The software evaluates documented public contributions and uses those evaluations to recommend how donated funds should be allocated. Our long-term goal is to make funding more continuous, transparent, and accessible to researchers and developers regardless of institutional affiliation.

World Science DAO operates online and invites worldwide participation. Donations for the project are legally received and controlled by Victor Porton’s Foundation. World Science DAO is not currently a separate incorporated charity. For the people behind the project, see Key Contributors.

AIIM is designed to reduce reliance on infrequent committee-based funding decisions by combining algorithmic evaluation with public records. Some features described on this page are implemented today and others are planned. In particular, additional on-chain auditability is part of the project roadmap rather than a claim that every current operation is already fully on-chain. See Product Status for the current implementation state.

Origin story

World Science DAO was started to explore alternatives to problems its founder experienced in research funding and publishing. Founding member Victor Porton is a mathematician and software developer whose work spans general topology and open-source software. AI Internet-Meritocracy grew from the idea that public evidence of contribution could be used as an input to funding decisions.

What we offer

• AI-assisted funding recommendations for science and FOSS: the app uses a large language model to estimate a contributor’s share of relevant output from publicly documented work and uses that estimate in proportional funding calculations. This is an experimental metric and should be evaluated as such.
• Potential government deployments: AIIM is intended to be deployable as a branded portal for public-sector science funding. See AIIM for Governments for the proposal; this should not be read as a claim that a government has already adopted AIIM unless a specific deployment is documented.
• DeSci education and open tools: we publish material about decentralized research funding and maintain projects such as XML Boiler.

How to evaluate and verify us

• Current status: planned and implemented features are distinguished on our Product Status page.
• People and credentials: contributor profiles link to ORCID, Google Scholar, code repositories, publications, and source documents where available on the Key Contributors page.
• Organizational transparency: donations are received and controlled by Victor Porton’s Foundation; World Science DAO itself is not currently a separate incorporated charity.
• Security: our security practices describe measures and plans relevant to production use.
• Public discussion: the project has been discussed in public Web3 forums, including a Gitcoin Governance proposal. A community proposal is evidence of public discussion, not independent endorsement.

Our values and approach

We emphasize openness, measurable contribution, global participation, and auditability. We welcome contributors without regard to degree or institutional affiliation and focus on publicly documented work. AI-based evaluation can make mistakes, so transparency, adversarial testing, and human scrutiny remain important parts of the project.

How to work with us

• Donors and foundations: support experiments in merit-based funding and review the project’s status and methodology before donating.
• Governments and public agencies: evaluate AIIM as a proposed tool for transparent science-funding workflows.
• Researchers and developers: publish work openly, document contributions, test the app, and report errors or weaknesses.

Illustrative use cases

The following are hypothetical examples of how AIIM is intended to be used; they are not claims of existing deployments or payouts.

• A public research agency compares AIIM recommendations with its existing grant process and publishes the differences for audit and discussion.
• A FOSS maintainer documents widely used software contributions and becomes eligible for funding when donated funds are available.
• An independent researcher without a university affiliation publishes papers, code, or datasets that can be evaluated from public evidence rather than credentials alone.

Press and public references

• Gitcoin Governance, December 28, 2023: [Proposal] Gitcoin killer app. This is a community proposal/discussion, not independent media coverage.
• King Newswire, August 13, 2023: coverage of Victor Porton’s Foundation and cryptocurrency micropayments for science. This item is a press release and should be interpreted as promotional material rather than independent editorial validation.

Economic motivation and evidence

Jones & Williams (1998), The Quarterly Journal of Economics, “Measuring the Social Return to R&D”, review empirical estimates of social returns to R&D ranging from roughly 30% to above 100% and argue that such estimates can be lower bounds in their framework. Their conservative calibration implies that optimal R&D investment may be about two to four times actual investment. This supports the general case that society can underinvest in R&D; it does not establish that a dollar invested in science normally produces a thousand dollars of social value.

Butler et al. (2023), Quantitative Science Studies, “The oligopoly’s shift to open access”, estimate approximately US$1.06 billion in article-processing charges paid to five large commercial publishers over 2015–2018 for the publications covered by their study. That paper does not estimate total global scholarly-publishing expenditure at US$9–10 billion per year, nor does it support a specific multi-trillion-dollar estimate of losses caused by publishing systems.

For credibility, we therefore treat the economic case for AIIM as a motivation to test better funding mechanisms, not as proof of a precise global-loss figure.

Media contacts

General inquiries and corrections: po****@*****on.name. See also the Contact page.

Authorship and editorial transparency

Initial page draft by Thomas Smith; edited by Victor Porton. AI-assisted editing has also been used for language, structure, SEO, and factual-clarity review. Where possible, factual claims are linked to primary or clearly identified secondary sources. Corrections are welcome through our Contact page.