Currently, SciWard has the following limitations:
- It is engineered to pay salaries only to open source developers, scientists, and science marketers/popularizers, not for example to non-science journalists.
- SciWard uses Node.js/PostgreSQL and a custodial payment workflow. The planned ICP rewrite was discontinued; centralized administrative control remains in place.
- Though sophisticated, prompt injection protection is unreliable. So, it relies on human voters.
- Batch OpenAI API usage is programmed, but not yet tested, and therefore is turned off. It works with the regular Responses API, instead.
Help Turn SciWard’s Beta into Evidence
SciWard remains experimental. The next proposed milestone is a five-month public adversarial test, with $1,000 planned for distribution to eligible funding recipients. Donations support the work required to run and evaluate that test.
Fund the public test → Test proposal → Independent review →
AI-generated evaluations can contain factual errors or biases;. Public testing, auditability, and external criticism remain part of the project.