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Ask Slashdot: Crowdfunding For Science — Can It Succeed?
jearbear writes "Can crowdfunding work for science? Having raised nearly $40,000 for scientific research in 10 days for projects as diverse as biofuel catalyst design to the study of cellular cilia to deploying seismic sensor networks (that attach to your computer!) to robotic squirrels, the #SciFund Challenge is taking off like a rocket. Might this be a future model for science funding in the U.S. and abroad? What would that mean?"
Can it succeed?
...for NASA?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Let me know when their entire budget is more than my laser system.
With a new roughing vacuum pump over 2k?
A temp controlled stirring hot plate at over 400 and often over a grand?
And we're not even talking about the more complicated experimental apparatus here. How is this more than a tiny tiny impact? This might fund a grad student. Maybe. Small grants rely on the existing infrastructure that groups have. You already have the equipment and the grad student and you allocate half their time to something.
Far too early to be crowing about how it's the next big thing with these funding levels.
(Aside: I work for a chemistry department doing lab equipment and instrument repair. At work, I spend my day finding ways to get equipment for such people for tiny fractions of the above prices. But, that's relying on the gear having been paid for years or decades back and me digging it out of storage, then finding ways to fix it for low cost. Starting up a lab without an existing infrastructure is expensive with a couple exclamation points. Yeah, I find the cost of current scientific gear to be outrageously high, but that's a different discussion.)
What would that mean? Total US R&D budget was $368 Billion in 2007. It means you'd have to increase it by a factor of 10,000,000. $40,000 is peanuts.
You've got to remember, though, that outside the simpler home-use inventions, science is expensive. A single Y chromosome decode costs between $1k-$5k, depending on the quality. Identifying genetic diseases means a full genome scan, at maybe 10x the price, but you can't just examine 1 individual. To be useful, you need hundreds if not thousands of samples, plus an equal number from your control group. So you're looking at $100,000,000 just for the analysis. Most bio labs cut corners, which is why most bio labs can't tell you much that's useful.
($40,000 is, frankly, chump change for anything of significance. It would buy you 4 hours of time in a low-end particle accelerator. It is a fifth of the cost of a decent-grade MALA ground penetrating radar unit. You might be able to buy a stormchaser vehicle with it, minus any scientific equipment to go in it.)
However, if you crowdsourced a million people per project, high-end science may be doable. The problem is convincing a million people to part with their money. Remember, getting donations is merely a voluntary version of taxation and people despise taxation. The fact that it's voluntary is immaterial, it doesn't change the cost of the project, it doesn't change the outcome of the project, it certainly doesn't change the management of the project. All of those matter far more than your goodwill.
Then there's the fact that a lot of these sites that handle such stuff are run by dweebs who are infinitely worse than any government agency when it comes to filing the proper paperwork, micromanaging what projects get listed, etc. Most of these sites are reputedly run by venture capitalists who would prefer it if they could waste your money rather than their own.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Another issue though is that all of humanity benefits from scientific advances. If government funding were to reduce and be replaced by fund raising drives, then (in the simplest case) those who don't contribute would be getting all the benefits (alternatives to fossil fuels, medical advances, etc) but with none of the upfront cost. Of course, we already have some fund raising for breast cancer/prostate cancer/MS/other specific disease but I would imagine this makes up a fairly small portion of their research budgets (and in some cases genuinely represents an investment in their personal future).
The obvious way around this is through a Kickstarter style reward system, where people who contribute get some specific rewards. But what would you offer? You get a share of the profits? (Well, now you're actually a corporation.) You get early access to the treatment? (That's not going to fly politically.) You get your name on the side of the particle accelerator? (That might work.)
Obviously, people are welcome to do whatever they want with their money, but I think government funding of science for the common good is the fairest scenario, and what we should be encouraging.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
As one of the co-founders of #SciFund, I'm curious, after you slashdotters go and look at the projects at http://scifund.rockethub.com and their videos and rewards, would YOU crowdfund these projects? (and if you would, then by all means, do so!) This is the first time we're trying this on any scale, and so have chosen to start with small projects that, if they don't get funded, won't set back anyone's research program. What we're really curious is if the science literate and science interested people like YOU would go over, see what scientists have up, and say "Yeah, I'll fund that."?
And if you want more background, check the articles our scientists are writing about this process.
I always wanted to see a crowdsourced manned Mars trip. If everyone in the country kicked what half a dozen or a dozen trips to Starbucks we could do it. Spread it worldwide and get kids raising money as science projects for school and some larger contributors kicking in money to have plaques with their names on them and we could definitely pull it off. I'd kick in a $100 right now and over time I'd even consider contributing a couple of grand just to see it happen. We're still quite a few years away from the next window so there's plenty of time to raise money. Show people progress so they feel involved and keep the excitement up. You may want to send another set of rovers to explore possible landing sites as part of it that would get people excited. It's probably the only way we'll get there in my lifetime.
Not always. Entire projects in, say, Ecology can be done for the cost of one sequence. Theoretical modeling can require little more than a laptop, pen, and paper. Already, many prototype or preliminary research experiments get done on the shoestring budget at the end of a grant. Big Science does not always mean Big Money. And maybe that's the kind of research crowdfunding is suited for.
Maybe they can crowd source a magnifying glass so your 3" pecker doesn't look so pathetic.
for medical research it seems a very good idea. For cancer is already going on by a lot of crowd-funded foundations, although I don't know the numbers. There are many illnesses (specially chronic or "rare" illnesses) for which the governments don't care at all and which research might get a lot of crowd-funds. If the funding individuals are clever the money can be better invested than by governments.
Ever wonder if this forum sometimes gets so caught up in its libertarian bias that it convinces itself that the reinvention of the wheel is heroic provided it's open sourced? Seriously, big science is the stuff of governmental funding. Small science can be done inside the mind or in a garage. And I'm sure Richard Branson would gladly empty your wallet to fund his space plane. Feeling charitable?
Crowsource funding for science will come off at best as well as crowsource funding for the arts, which is pretty much what we've had for the last several decades. The masses will fund what tickles their fancy, or their ego, and the smart researcher will tap into that by pandering. Science will end up with its equivalent of Justin Beeber, Hank Williams, Jr., Gwen Stephanie, and the list goes on.
My colleagues and I came up with a great idea along these lines some years ago (I've been in research since 1980) - one of us would grow a large head of hair and dye it white. He'd be the front man for a Church of Researching God's Creation (I think t that's the name we came up with) which we'd take to the airways to surf for donations. If done right, this could bring in serious money. Of course, we'd all have to look at ourselves in the mirror every now and then, but by the number of highly successful (and very rich) evangelicals floating around that must be a solvable problem.
No voluntary program is going to deliver enough funds to science to really meet the definition most scientists would define as 'working'.
Unfortunately, forced support via taxation is the only realistic way.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It's still new, wait. As a new concept, people actually believe that if they give money to someone trying to invent something weird, that it'll actually get invented most of the time. Just wait.
In short-order, people will realize that 50% of this kind of research goes nowhere forever, and another 40% of it fails out-right quickly. Only 10% makes it to what we're going to call, here, a prototype. And of those, only half make it to what we'll call a break-even point.
Finding people willing to invest has never been the difficult part. The challenge is in finding people willing to lose their investment 18 times, and break even once, before finally succeeding on the 20th attempt.
Wait, they'll learn fast.
I believe that crowdfunding is a nice idea to push ideas that are just not profitable enough but could really benefit a number of people. A lot of small open source projects, especially software projects, can achieve a lot with not too much money. $40k is enough for paying a developer a few months, a laptop and some travelling cost. The outcome can be estimated by comparing to other projects and the amount of time it takes to put together a working prototype.
In the end everybody can just copy the software and use it for his or her own purposes.
In science this approach looks often quite different. We had a summer student at our lab and he was given a small project. We used equipment our lab already had for about $50k and consumables for about $1k. He got a total of $3k as a stipend to cover living costs and traveling. The mechanical workshop put about 20 hours into the modification of the devices we were using.
We worked hard on the project and in the end achieved to measure a physical property (specific heat) on one sample at both low temperatures and high magnetic fields. The results on that one sample alone are not enough to be publishable in a good journal because we would need to verify/compare this with at least another two samples and then in the end it would hopefully show that a specific superconductor has a particular wave function at very low temperatures.
This result alone is only meaningful if you look at it in a much wider context to help in the understanding of a big problem in condensed matter physics.
So with a small grant or stipend like this you can in practice only pay a researcher for a few months to work at a lab that has a lot of equipment and not enough people using it. Really starting any kind of project from scratch is not realistic in many disciplines where the individual researcher is dependent on a good and often expensive infrastructure to allow looking for new things.
I am pretty sure that a crowdfunding group would be seriously disappointed with the outcome of our small project, even if it was successful (and usually they are not).
There are just very few low-hanging fruits available and the others require a big effort to reach.
If i could see my money would all help research efforts in the fields of space exploration, space based power generation, innovative green power, genetic mutation or increasing life span and health as well as many others i would donate $1000 - $10000. If a well thought out system existed and it had enough freedom it could be fantastic; but with all the rules and regulations involved as well as bureaucrats getting half the money, I'm not sure it would reach it's full potential.
This is what democratic government is for; the majority forces everybody to contribute for the benefit of all. (note: I specified democratic; obviously, a broken one is no longer functioning as democracy and is so only a democracy in name...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
using "crowdfunding" sounds very contemporary but basically its all already paid for with taxes and if you cut out the administrative layer of ombudsmen then how on earth would anyone know how the money is really being spent? That's what the bureaucrats are for. And ultimately we are just going to sit through appeal after appeal for money just like when you try to listen to NPR and they are yet again just having another fund drive. Are research funding decisions really going to be left to a popularity contest on the Internet?
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
Try the question this way: does Shareware work? I think the answer to that is a resounding NO for the authors.
However, nickle and dime ware (ala App Store) does work amazingly well. So, maybe science projects could publish an app, and patrons could get some kind of exciting insider news first on their smartphone or in their e-mail in exchange for their continued small donations?
How many people would subscribe at $10/month to a "Manned Mission to the Moon." The media division of the project (making the videos and other rewards for the subscribers) could do a damn impressive job for less than 1% of the ongoing cost of the mission.
Leave it to the marketing geniuses to determine what you get for 0.99 one time, vs 0.99 per month, 9.99 per month, etc.
Expect and demand that their awarded PIs send cash to their personal bank accounts as a prerequsite of proposal approval.
Awarded proposal have a 5K cap for ... hahump ... insendential expense.
Guess where that mony goes! Ah Ha. Right into the program manageres bank accounts.
Thank you Uncle Sam. In Spades. Mummy loves you.
++
I have seen this before with Dr Robert Bussard's appeals for fusion research funding. The problem is, the average schmo doesn't have more than a few dollars to contribute; it takes millions of them to raise the amounts needed. On the other hand, a wealthy investor or government agency could make an immediate difference.
I have a self funded (so far) fusion lab, we're getting results. We don't like to ask for money, as that would seem to put us among the charlatans out there, and we're good, but we don't and can't claim we're getting to breakeven in some short timeframe - that would just be a lie, but we are making lots of progress, which we openly report all the time on my forums (see my sig). Myself and a partner have put in about a quarter million, and we are excellent scroungers - we are swimming in surplus/repaired equipment, no problems there, our approach doesn't need much more than a few good vacuum systems and stuff we can (and have) make in the machine shop we built to support this. But we need "hands and brains". Grad students, or similar. We get plenty of people who'd do this work for love, but they have student loans, or kids, or whatever - they can't work free, but could and would work very cheap. Money like that would hire one (create a job), and push a good project ahead a lot quicker than I can do it alone.... Just sayin...
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I always knew ./ as depressing. And I'm completely right. Have you ever just happenstancley (I crowd sourced to get funding to coin that word) slid over to kickstarter? There's some pretty cool excretion over there. Crowdsourcing is fun, and I'd say it would be even more fun if you could ask questions, make suggestions (even if they never get read) about the experiment in progress. I have more faith in that, than the crap doled out from industry today. But you slashdotters, OMG. Bitchingest bunch of people I've ever read. Every one of you thinks you're an expert in every field. Hahaha. (get Jimmy Wales behind em and they think they know everything)
I'll digress... There is an new 'pyramid' scam out there, I'll spare you the name. But it proves one thing. You don't need a product. You don't need results. And they will tell you "You don't need to do a thing to make money." All you need are people who will send you money. Guess what? There are people that will. I'd rather send my money to this. Thanks. Hey SciFund, here I come!
The biggest cost in academic research is salary. Either it's the PI's supplemental salary (e.g. summer salary), post docs or grad students. $40k is can pay for one post doc for one year. In short, $40k is nothing. If you can get to the half million or million dollar level, then it would work.
I would send $100 to NASA right now
$18.7 billion (NASA current budget) / 110 million people in the workforce = $170 per person
Why do you want to drastically cut NASAs funding? (tongue in cheek)
The problem with basic scientific research is that it often involves concepts too esoteric and complicated to be readily understood by the public.
If I tried to explain why you should fun a study of the color of highly unstable metal compounds, you might think I'm crazy. Of course it is studies like these in the early 1900's that lead to our understanding of molecular orbital theory and thus helped in the development of semiconductor transistors.
The large cognitive and temporal gap between basic research and applications will prevent such projects from getting funded. Sure people will fund robotic squirrel projects, but why bother with a gas-phase ion chemistry project, never mind the unseen world changing applications 50 years down the road.
The system works as it is now. Taxes fund scientific advancement agencies where qualified individuals evaluate grant applications based on the merits of the proposal and the reputation of the researcher. It's not perfect; tallent is occasionally overlooked, stagnation is occasionally rewarded, but it's the best system we have now.
James Cameron can get a $1B budget to make films. All he has to do is say "I'm thinking about doing live-action furry porn on location on Olympus Mons" and Bang! he's got a billion dollars to get 'er done - and if he goes over by twice, it's no biggie. The people who are paying neither know nor care that Olympus Mons is a mountain on Mars rather than on Earth. All they know or care about is that they'll likely get several times their money, and at worst will probably lose half.
NASA needs to sexy up their sciency bits. Astro Gurlz in thongs. Interplanetary coital acrobatic theory. Deep space orgy dynamics. There's a lot of milestone research to be done here that could fund both interplanetary science and the Earth observation mission. And they need an artsy filter type to just barely squeek it past the prudes. Where's the "Girls Gone Wild" guy now?
We're apes. Give us what we want and we'll pay for what you want.
I'm as critical as anyone out there, and that's precisely why I'm participating - to see how well the paradigm could potentially work. I've blogged my critiques & suggestions more fully here but in brief let's recap the main points:
- Funding for science is in decline in the US. Will crowdfunding be able to come to the rescue of multi-million dollar research programs? NO. But a LOT of good science - particularly by students - can be done on a low budget. Compare Hollywood to Indie films, there's a direct analogy. Big money doesn't always mean better. And there are a lot of problems in the world right now that need as many people working on them as possible.
- Taxation and public funding of science screened by auditors (i.e. reviewers) with authority is preferable WHEN IT WORKS. But in the life sciences (here I include every form of biology and ecology) I see that some fields are getting squeezed out of existence because others a) draw big grant money (e.g. health research) or b) are fads. Science and scientists are are as prone to following fads as anyone else. The public at least can follow its gut - they put millions into funding cancer research Just Because They Can.
- Traditional funding is completely opaque to the average person. ALL of science funding does not need to come directly from one individual to another. But wherever there can be direct communication between donor and recipient, I feel it should be encouraged. Scientists in general needs as many tools as they can to communicate their work to the public and money is a good motivator.
- AGREED - I am in favor of a non-profit paradigm. I don't want people profiting off the funds for a number of reasons, least of which is that crowdfunding is already an attempt at making up for shortfalls in tax-based spending on science. That money ought to be spent on science in the first place, why send it Back to a government that has failed this portion of its constituents to begin with to have it spent on things we'd rather not?
- Accountability - this needs to be strengthened, but CAN be done.
- Open question: are people willing to spend on science the same way they spend on charities & arts projects?
Thanks.
Folks who have never done research have this romanticized notion that researchers just sit there and think up new stuff all day long, and it works beautifully the first time they hit the button, and revolutionizes the life as we know it every time. Truth is, 99% of the research done today is incremental at best, folks just combine existing stuff into something borderline new and try it out, then tweak it some, and try it out again. That's what research is — you go down the alleys to see if they're blind, and most of the time they are. 90% of it is fruitless waste of time and money, you just don't know which 90%. The remaining 10% makes it more than worthwhile, but the core thing to understand here is that it's incredibly hard, and _expensive_ work which most of the time produces a "no" and "try something else". When people fund something out of their own pocket, they generally expect a return on their investment and get pissed off with negative outcomes.
That is pretty much how science operated prior to the twentieth century. It even worked, in a limited sense. After all, it did give scientific research a huge kick-start. But let's be realistic too. It would be next to impossible to maintain current rates of scientific progress using that model because you can achieve far higher funding levels by taxing a hundred million people a dollars a head per year than you would by persuading a hundred people to donate a million dollars a head. (Since very few of those donations would be offered on an annual basis.)
I have been fascinated by the comments in this thread. And I realize perhaps I mis-stated the question. The tacit assumption seems to have been that this may be a potential replacement for NSF/NIH funding or otherwise that can completely support a research lab.
And maybe it can. But I agree with all the posters that the chances of crowdfunding as a complete replacement for more traditional funding sources are highly unlikely. As everyone has noted, #SciFund is targeting pieces of research programs rather than whole labs (although we do have some folk trying for a chunk of their salary). And perhaps it is no accident that the first time around, the disciplines and scientists that have been attracted to #SciFund are not ones who are trying to purchase or use multi-million dollar pieces of equipment.
So, perhaps the question should be, Crowdfunding for science - when and where can it be used successfully?
Because, really, the answer to the first question, can it succeed at all for any project, no matter the size, rests on folk like you. But what are its best uses? That's a bigger issue that I'd love to hear more thoughts about, as we're still grappling with it.
(FYI, we'll also be doing a formal analysis of all of the projects and their funding records at the end of the 45 day funding period - #SciFund runs through Dec 15th, so, we have pulled in $40K now, but we still have a month left to get more, if you want to contribute and help us figure out what projects are really capturing people's imagination when it comes to funding.)
Sorry, but I want public funding to go towards scientific research for two reasons.
First and foremost, you need public funding to support pure science. There are a few branches of pure science that will attract private donations, but most won't. Take astronomy vs. computers in the pre-WWII era. Astronomy was almost entirely impractical, but it attracted deep pockets. Real computers (i.e. anything beyond adding machines) received very little love at all, even though they turned out to be hugely important to society down the road. Computers were developed primarily because of government funding during and after WWII. Heck, even Charles Babbage received government funding. But all of the other computing projects (and there were a few) received inadequate funding and ended up going nowhere.
Although I believe that copyright is a good thing when done correctly, I also believe that today copyright is impeding new developments and is impacting negatively the human specie.
What I would like to see is for this project is to first develop a hedge software, so it can fund itself to a very large intent, and then to use all that money to lobby US Government to fix Copyright law.
Only after that, it makes sense to pursue other projects. Otherwise they will be killed by patent trolls.
It will be effective for science only in the short run. It will work for a while until the money makers get a smell of it and ruin the model by channeling the money away into their own coffers, under the fall pretence that they are doing it all for the greater good of the scientific community.
I know, why don't a lot of us who live in the same area agree to all put in some of our money regularly, and use it to pay for science, but also to pay for some people to keep the roads in good condition, keep an eye on bad people, let some people not have to do their jobs full time but instead be full time teachers, full time doctors, that kind of thing. That would be a fantastic way of sharing out the costs amongst us and make sure science and other things get done that wouldn't happen otherwise. We could even crowdsource the decision making process, call it "government". And the crowdsourced income generating strategy, we could call it "taxes".
I'm not sure it will succeed, but I've heard a rumour that science is funded in some other countries in this way, in some cases for quite a few years...
Transparent tax is what that eventually leads to. And not even full transparency but a little transparency with "this is where your money is really going" would be nice but impractical.
Therefore, a donation culture is needed, and is indeed growing. Ideally a government should not be able to fund any genuine private sector company. The people should do that. People should be required to do 2 things by law: A) Donate money to a private sector cause directly B) Not pay taxes for a private sector cause.
For me, we are rushing headlong into Terminator (flying auto drones etc.) so I want more money in emotional intelligence for AI - not because I want it but because we've already gone down the AI route and there seems to be no stopping it. I want A.I. or iRobot before Terminator. I also want to see a permanent public settlement on the Moon. I want us to mine the moon. I want to an Atmospheric base on Venus that can be traveled to by ordinary people. I want more money in things like korot and other planet finding missions. I think we owe it to ourselves to find a genuine Earthlike planet within a 100 light years if one exists. I also want such a planet finding mission retired for several centuries if we are unsuccessful and have exhausted our search throughout all nearby stars within 100 lightyears, or at least have its budget greatly reduced at that point. I want us to be more moderate politically in every facet. Extremism on either side - liberal Libertarianism, or far right Fascist totalitarianism isn't working obviously. Neither of those can work. We need to force ourselves into scientific moderation or centrism as a matter of all global and geoplolitical policy. We need to save ourselves the bother and auto-compromise. It's all too obvious that Centrism and moderation is where compromise usually ends up and needs to end up. We need to be wiser and stop fighting amongst ourselves in these difficult times. We could really do witha couple of centuries worth of a 'Time Out' on politics for a period of moderation. Just push scientifically enforced compromise on anyone or anything (including the big dogs) and just accept that we're greedy beings and need to have none of our way for a time.
Basic science, ie the exploration of the fundamental universe (defined another way, that science which will never make anybody a buck), doesn't look very sexy to the outsider. People will give money to fund a neat invention or support charismatic megafauna (the fuzzier the better), but the nuts and bolts and gears of basic science would grind to a halt if you replaced NSF with passing the hat. My prediction is that few if any crowdsourced projects will produce significant basic science, no matter how you choose to measure it. But show me and I will believe.
Second point is that we already have a crowdsource system in place (flawed, but it *does* produce measurable returns) for identifying hot new basic science: The peer review system, which judges projects based on their likelihood to succeed and produce significant results. Complain about *that* system all you want, but show me another that works and we can adopt it. (Hint: doesn't exist).
Third, a single project that pays a grad student salary, enough of my time to supervise her, travel for her to a national meeting to present her groundbreaking results, analytical costs and overhead, costs about $60,000 a year, ignoring the capital costs of equipment. That means I have to attract 600 $100 supporters each year just to fund a grad student. How can I hire a grad student for the first year, if I'm not sure that remaining two will come through? OK, so now I have to generate 1800 supporters in year 1 in order to fully fund a project. Just ask Greenpeace how hard this is to do when the subject is save the baby harp seals with big eyes. Most people can't even pronounce the thing I work on, much less relate it to something that gives them a wallet-opening warm feeling.
Why don't you just come out and say what you really mean? You want to force others to pay for things that you value (and they obviously don't) because (as you admitted yourself) these people would never choose to pay for it voluntarily. They don't value it, yet they are force to pay for it.
In other words, "public funding" is merely a feel-good term for "fork it over or face the consequences".
He's right though, while being dryly funny, that yes, a humble envelope is a valid scientific tool because while brainstorming you aren't "producing" anything. You're staring out of focus wondering why your equation "just looks wrong" despite having checked it 7 times to confirm there was no simple blunder.
So the envelope might contain a key graph, an Unhappy Face, a couple swear words, a doodle of the waitress, and three half baked equations with a big mystery gap in them.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
No. Of course not. Don't be silly. Is this question really some sort of joke?
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Every time I read "for science", I think "For science! You monster..."
Damn Memes.
I suggest that some group try it and see. One might speculate that the reason it hasn't been tried except with stupid shit like SETI is that there's too much free government cash available even now in this so-called age of austerity.
Like any form of mass marketing, crowdsourcing science basically comes down to convincing large numbers of people that what you are doing provides enough value (not necessarily in monetary terms) that putting some of their own money toward it is a worthwhile thing to do.
In a society that has become increasingly skeptical of doing a thing for the thing's own sake, that's a lot harder than it used to be, and it's true in fields across all political boundaries: weapons research would find itself without all that many takers, and likewise for most kinds of zoological research (though paleontologists might be able to find funding because OMG DINOSAURS). Those fields with a large number of armchair theorists would find themselves in particular peril: no one, but no one, wants to risk their pet models of sociology or educational theory being counter-proven into oblivion.
Some would say that this difficulty for finding funding in some fields is a feature, not a bug. You could probably convince most people of that, actually, if you carefully weighted your arguments toward fields toward which they would not contribute. But the question remains: what becomes of those fields?
As I joined the #SciFund Challenge late, I just posted up the project I had just talked about most recently with local teachers (STEMulate Learning) without prior experience in crowdfunding efforts. I focused my descriptions and even the project video (YouTube Video) on the technical aspects of the project and the simple long-term goal of encouraging students to focus on science, technology, engineering and math studies. I also aimed the proposal at full funding for a complete lab installation, as I would for any traditional grant request.
I have received a great deal of feedback from would-be supporters and followers of my #SciFund topic curation magazine (#SciFund at Scoop.It) that crowdfunded research needs to illustrate more obvious value and intermediate goals. Instead of identifying long-term goals for full funding, I should have focused on the immediate supercomputing support for childhood disease cures, researching cancer, finding clean water and discovering clean energy that would start immediately once a minimal $3,800 was raised for the intitial setup.
Short-term and understandable goals are far more effective in research crowdfunding efforts like the wonderful Roman DNA project that Kristina has already fully funded plus half again (Ancient Roman DNA), while those will immediate appeal like the magnificent Zombie Fish project Kelly has also fully funded with excess (Support Zombie Research!). These projects capture the interest of the public and have already been funded, while most of the remaining 47 projects are working more slowly towards their goals.
Traditional grantmaking supports research that is too costly for individual investors to expect to make a difference, too esoteric or exotic for layfolk to understand its value, or research that may be performed in order to disprove an existing established idea that might provide truly "groundbreaking" innovations at the cost of revising established human understanding. Crowdfunding research best supports smaller projects, including those that are either seen as "fun" or immediate in their results. The combination of these is a magnificent opportunity for synergistic top-down and bottom-up scientific inquiry.
If the founders decide to run a second round of the #SciFund Challenge (#SciFund at RocketHub), many of us will benefit from this initial "testing the waters" so it has been joyous to take part. For my own project, I would focus on the fun aspects of doing immediate global good starting with a small amount of initial funding, which is possible now but not obvious in the project aimed more towards traditional grantmaking venues. I believe many other researchers will use the experiences from pioneers of crowdfunded science to better design their own studies for the future. It is a glorious idea for the future of scientific endeavour, which will synergize with traditional grant-based research marvelously.