1. Introduction

Coordination and productive activities benefit from, if not entirely rely on, trust, particularly trust that can be earned at a low cost. Trust is regarded as one of the most important intrinsic designs that fuelled the rise of blockchain-based applications, with trustable infrastructure both in immutability and the absence of a centralised controller, allowing transactions to be recorded by a significant number of network nodes that are in agreement with what constitutes facts and reality — The ledger is accessible without the need for permission, making it completely open and transparent; in cases of data change or even hacking, the network functions as a decentralised autonomous machine that accurately represents events.

Central to our discussion is the social technology that leverages existing decentralised infrastructures to facilitate community coordination. This coordination is critical for communities to make informed decisions and manage information transparently and efficiently. The process involves a meticulous design of collaborative editing, verification, and dispute resolution mechanisms that align with the principles of anonymity and incentive alignment.

Problem Statement. What is true? Who can tell? In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, the ability to manage and govern collective knowledge efficiently is becoming increasingly crucial. The three criteria of knowledge—belief, truth, and justification—are central to the traditional definition of knowledge called "justified true belief.” How do we know what is more likely to be true? Credible sources of information are hard to find in general with broken links to unverifiable sources, and the dependency on institutional sources has seen its own pitfalls.

Traditional centralised knowledge management systems often struggle with issues of transparency, data immutability, and equitable governance. Such systems typically place control in the hands of a few, creating bottlenecks and diminishing trust among users. Additionally, these centralised mechanisms are prone to single points of failure, which can compromise the integrity and availability of critical data.

Preliminaries. The concept of "decentralised social consensus" is often discussed in the context of blockchain and decentralised technologies. While blockchain inherently acts as a secure, transparent, and immutable repository of data, its primary function is often transactional or contractual rather than serving as a knowledge base in the traditional sense (like Wikipedia or a database of academic papers). Its use in applications that require robust, tamper-proof documentation makes it akin to a knowledge base, but focused more on the preservation and verification of data rather than the collaborative generation or management of knowledge.

As the development of distributed technology and decentralised coordination mechanisms have advanced in the last decade, we propose that community-owned knowledge bases, decentralised not only in the storage but also in mechanisms of consensus and governance are not only technically implementable but also necessary for efficient large-scale coordination to happen within any community. The advent of Web3 technologies offers a transformative opportunity to address these challenges through decentralised solutions. However, while decentralised applications (dApps, i.e.blockchain protocols) promise greater autonomy and security, they frequently encounter difficulties in achieving scalable and effective coordination among diverse and distributed stakeholders. Effective governance in decentralised environments remains particularly challenging, compounded by issues such as anonymity and incentive misalignment, which can hinder collective decision-making and dispute resolution.

More crucially, the absence of a reliable, decentralised platform for fact verification and collaborative knowledge base as source of truth exacerbates the problem of misinformation and inefficiencies in knowledge dissemination. Communities and projects often lack the necessary infrastructure to make informed decisions and execute actions based on collectively agreed-upon and verified information (if verifiable).This issue is not unique to communities working on decentralised technologies; it affects all communities that struggle to reach a consensus when consensus on collective facts is hidden and significant challenge.

It is only with collectively construed reality, communities can make meaningful discussions and coordinate to take actions. While the world is not poor of information, it is critical that development in social technologies materialised in information technology can take collective sense-making to the next level where not only collective editing is a fundamental component, but decentralised consensus and collective ownership are also mathematically guaranteed, verifiable and accessible to all. Furthermore, it is essential to both ensure and encourage the ongoing sharing and recording of events not captured in existing databases, and to provide more contextualised interpretations. These efforts are significant in addressing the critical challenges posed by artificial intelligence when human subjectivity is paradoxically the most precious to highlight and people should be further encouraged for playing the unique role of creation and curation based on history and value preferences.

This paper addresses these critical gaps by proposing a novel framework for a decentralised, collectively governed, and owned knowledge base. This framework leverages existing decentralised technologies to facilitate better coordination of collective intelligence. By improving mechanisms for editing, updating, verification, and governance, this solution aims to enhance the legitimacy, reliability, and efficiency of collaborative knowledge management.

The proposed solution, exemplified through the real-world application of ECF.network by the Ethereum Community Fund, demonstrates the practical viability and benefits of this approach. It showcases how decentralised platforms can empower communities to achieve transparent and effective coordination, ultimately fostering trust and alignment of resources toward collective goals.