I’m Sid / sidcode / Siddhant. My name means principles / tenets. That is probably why I was naturally drawn to the Kernel syllabus ;) Soon after my block wrapped up for me as a Fellow, I was asked if I wanted to be a Steward. I accepted this gift of a responsibility to best map out this unparalleled community of care that is building the heart of our interdependent web.

This post is an attempt at mapping my meaningful meanders.

Web3 journey so far:

• First foray: introduced to build on IPFS in 2016 and stumbled upon Juan Benet ¹ (accidentally). Read the annotated Bitcoin paper too but did not grok the social consequences fully until much later.
• Academic: researching smart contracts, memes, communities, and NFTs via IC3, Cornell University.
• DAOs: GitcoinDAO, Token Engineering Commons, SuperTeam, Algovera, ScienceFund, Verses
• GitcoinDAO: started in Moonshot Collective, helped on the ultimate DAO workers report, tech coordinator for MMM (memes, merch, marketing), a librarian at the Public Goods workstream. Public Goods are good.
• Governauts: researching reward systems for the next wave of DAO coordination on a governauts scholarship with Token Engineering Commons. Here’s a talk I gave on CommonsWTH - measuring the wealth, truth, and health of our commons.
• Projects: Silent Auth, DeSchool, contributor to memes.party, Declaration of Interdependence of Cyberspace, The Truth Wins - a censorship-resistance project with Reporters Without Borders, DDB, and Hyperinteractive Studios.
• Hackathons: won the first prize and popularity prize at the Singapore Blockchain Innovation Challenge in December 2021 for cross-chain community authentication for DAOs, won the Balaji Srinivasan Prize at the Solana India hackathon in September 2021, a special prize at HackZurich 2021, and the overall prize at National Blockchain Challenge in 2019 in Singapore. The real prize in all of these are my friends whom I got to spend those hours with, and the new friends I made subsequently!

Tech / (Computer) Science:

• Security: researching and building cyber-physical security systems for national critical infrastructures at the iTrust Centre for Research in Cyber Security, Singapore University of Technology and Design
• Space: satellite image processing and remote sensing for the Indian Space Research Organization. My first foray into free and open source software.
• Distributed Systems: and Engineering at one of the best systems teams at Goldman Sachs
• Robotics: Worked extensively with mobile robot teams and rovers via Google Summer of Code, Italian Mars Society and Python Software Foundation. Blog link
• Extended Reality: designing explainable security and smart cities for policymakers through VR/AR/MR.
• Papers and Patents: despite their pitfalls, centralized institutions have assembled our knowledge graph reasonably OK so far for getting one’s ideas out there

Economics, Policy:

• Cyber-physical security: actively involved in co-organizing and contributing to global and local cyber-physical security exercises- like NATO’s Locked Shields and Critical Infrastructure Security Showdown.
• Startup life: helping build more secure and usable authentication systems for anything.
• Pseudonymous work: editor of the sequel to a top Bitcoin and economics book that you may have most likely read.
• Banking: learned a lot about private/public investment management, banking, and markets at my first job as a strategic analyst at Goldman Sachs.
• Consulting: advising policymakers and companies who’re building the future of society.

Community (local):

• DesignSG | founder and co-admin for a community of 2300+ designers.
• CryptoTechSG | founder and co-admin for a local community of crypto practitioners. Fun fact: I made Vitalik give a shoutout to the community in one his AMAs.
• Better.sg | volunteering as a project co-lead and builder in multiple projects listed here on non-verbal accessibility, safety, and multicultural issues via gaming and interactive fiction.
• Other Singapore-based groups: ProductSG, GatherSG, Creative Technologists
• India-based groups: Climbing (Bangalore Climbing Initiatives) and Skating (Bengaluru Skaters)

Community (international)

• 1729 | Contributor to DAO and Security discussions, hosting Singapore events.
• Steward at Kernel and Gitcoin.
• DWeb | Helping steward the Singapore and Bengaluru nodes.
• Superteam member | not as active as I’d like
• Complexity Weekend | Facilitator, eusocial participAnt, and co-organizer.
• Active Inference Lab | curious student of this emerging field and have contributed to a DeSci paper and a robotics livestream.

Culture:

• Poetry: expressing computing culture by translating classical Urdu/Hindi poetry to English at CodeShayari. Selected works.
• Design: MIT Media Lab design innovation workshop. I designed Smart Textiles.
• Storytelling: bringing stories to code and pull requests (pseudonymoyus stealth project, to be released soon)
• Humanities: involved in multiple communities studying forgotten/current/emerging cultures (around the world in cyber-physical spaces)

Personal:

• Physical Culture: amateur bodybuilding, strength training, calisthenics, martial arts (Kalaripayattu), and aiming for the foundational domains of fitness
• Longevity: been a training/nutrition/sleep geek since before it was cool
• Food: Love everything and anything about the form and function of food of all kinds
• Generalist: very putty-like | interested in many things
• Sports: climbing, skating, football, frisbee, dragon boating, swimming, and soon table tennis (thanks to a friend)
• Dance: enthusiast (about music in general)
• Filmmaking and combining hobbies- like this one

Upbringing:

• 90s kid
• a torchbearer of the relay generation, the last one to be proficient with both analog and digital worlds
• mixed culture kid (genotypically and phenotypically)
• moved around quite a bit in different geographies across continents - coast, desert, valley, mountain, wetland, island, and soon in a network state (maybe).
• used to sing as a kid in the Christmas choir and Indian Classical Music. Then life happened. Now it is a plan for later.

Socials:

• @sidcode on Twitter
• @sidcode on LinkedIn
• sidcode#1729 on Discord

All the social networks which I’m gradually giving up on before they give themselves up. Once bitten, twice shy. Looking at you, G+

Thanks for reading! If you’ve read this far, ping me and I’ll send you a POAP ;) Fin

1. Unrelated: I was invited to speak at the same symposium at Stanford 3 years later ↩

https://memes.party is live!

At every Memepalooza, hundreds of memes per month are produced. The themes span across public goods, web3, the open internet and the other values Gitcoin and GitcoinDAO cares about. Right now these memes get lost and forgotten as new memes pop up. We MUST curate them. Enter Meme Museum 🤡

The Meme museum aims to help fix this by celebrating great memes and great meme artists by curating memes, displaying them, telling stories about them, and making it easy for anyone to visit the digital museum, and share them to help push forward the spirit of GitcoinDAO.

Memes as xDAI NFTs ? Also helps with onboarding web2 memelords to web3 :)

Memepalooza participants also seemed hyped about this, but that is a biased audience 😂

The problem we faced: memes get lost and underappreciated in the discord UX. They should be out in the open and not in some walled garden.

Solution - a web3 museum of memes where the best memes and memelords get appreciated with votes and tips

Version 1 of the Meme Museum:

• View memes on the frontpage - sorted by upvotes, daily meme (knowyourmeme style)
• Sign in with web3 to upvote/downvote/upload
• Upload memes in image formats (.jpg/.png)
• Adding stories to every meme’s page (knowyourmeme)
• Crediting it to possible OG meme artists who created that meme first