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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?"
Yup, this is indeed small for now. If you total up all of the projects and what we're shooting for, though, it's about $250K, so, not tiny. Although, to give you context, we actually told all of the scientists to start small as this has never been tried on this scale before. It's an experiment, really, to see if it can work at all. Phase 2 is scaling up.
It should be noted, though, that many projects are asking for amounts that are reasonable within their discipline. We have a lot of ecologists whose needs for running and analyzing experiments often fall in the $1-5K range, rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, I'm seeking ~$7K to fund two days of sampling in kelp forests in the California Channel Islands. It's not huge, but it's what is needed for the kind of data I collect.
Needs vary greatly between disciplines and projects.
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.
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.