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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.
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.)
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)
Convincing smart people to part with their money as opposed to giving it to somebody else is a part of the process. I'm sure there are cases where genuinely important research gets delayed or denied because it isn't obviously important, but over all given the scarcity of money in general for science that's what's going to happen. We can't send probes to the moon every time somebody has an idea that relates in some vague way to the moon.
And yes, $40k is chump change for most things.
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
And how do you fund ongoing projects? Many (if not most) worthwhile scientific endeavors take decades. Having funding depending on a crowd's momentary whim doesn't seem like a good long term strategy. This problem already exits in the current funding scheme - long term projects often get dinged when money is scarce but at least there are (imperfect) mechanisms to deal with the problems.
Prioritizing science and technology funding is difficult. Letting the 'crowd' do it makes no sense at all.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
It seems like a decent solution might be to allow people the option to determine what their current tax dollars go towards. Right now the government supports a great amount of research, disaster relief, art, non-profits, etc.. Now that we live in the information age it'd be simple to pull those out of the normal budget and allow politically non-apathetic people to decide where that 5% or so of their taxes go. If you like NASA, throw your 5% there. Breast cancer survivors would probably put their 5% into that sort of medical research. Those on Florida's East coast would probably favor FEMA, and so on. The really picky could divvy up their dollars, and the apathetic would default to what we do now.
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.
The reason why the government covers things like that is that it's not sexy enough to attract attention from the private sector. Sort of like how there are unpopular but vital services that need to be provided. Most people get angry about having to pay tolls and angrier about not having a road to drive on so the government steps in and builds it with tax dollars.
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.
Don't you mean "convincing the rich people to part with their money?
The smart people don't need much convincing, in my experience.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And I always wanted to see Olivia Hunt with her knickers down around her ankles.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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?
Both good reasons why the answer to the headline question is "no".
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.
IMHO, the problem isn't that these services aren't popular, they just aren't marketable. SpaceX, for example, has no products available for $300 (i.e. ~5% of the median income tax revenue), so there's no commercial way to support space exploration. As other posters have pointed out, $40k is a drop in the bucket for most research, so donations don't work too well either. (Plus there's incentive to exploit good will, such as "Awareness" fundraisers.)
One vital difference between research and roads is that we fund research because it's the right thing to do, not because we would suffer without it in the short term. So, if nobody wants to fund research into the hok/sok plasmid system, then it's not a huge deal. (Realistically, the researcher could explain that it serves to maintain drug resistance in such pathogens as E. coli O157:H7, and drum up some support that way, or just classify it under a "Medical Research" category.) OTOH, some pure science research is a hard sell to the public, so that's why one would rely on the politically apathetic to support it.
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!
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.
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.
If i could see my money would all help research efforts in the fields of ...innovative green power, genetic mutation ... health as well as many others i would donate $1000 - $10000... 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.
Given how things work for #SciFund, we have an 8% overhead to rockethub and about a 2-5% for folk at universities (although this varies) since it goes through a different channel than government grants. And we have projects looking at greener power applications as well as problems of global good production. So, great! Sounds like a perfect match for you!
The smart people are, sadly, not the ones with money. Smart people spend too much time understanding their subject to spend time making a killing on the stockmarket. It is entirely about the rich, who didn't become rich for the benefit of others. They can sometimes be persuaded, but they see it as a tax writeoff, not as a means of benefiting humanity.
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)
Agreed. The idea is obviously derived from angel investors and venture capitalists, but those have a motive to continue (such as pwning anything that works), aren't subject to whims of the moment and are careful about where they put money (there being a limited amount of the stuff).
Now, I'm willing to concede that there are mini projects that this sort of system will work on. DIY stuff, or maybe archiving material of some sort, but that's about the limit of its reach.
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)
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.
Problematic. Not only is science unsexy, the overheads of administering such a system would seriously cripple the money available.
Now, I can see an alternative maybe working - perhaps every 10 years hold a national referendum on what the priorities should be (put your 1st, 2nd and 3rd down), where no project attaining more than some threshold score can get funding cut back (after allowing for inflation) for those ten years.
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)
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...
I'm a theoretical physicists. $40,000 can pay for a LOT of paper and pencils...
You still do your calculations on the back of an envelope? But then again, you can use your mobile phone now to do calculations on that you needed a super duper top of the line computer for only 5 years ago.
-- Cheers!
Why not take a trip to antarctica? The gravity and atmosphere are more friendly to humans, but aside from that they're about as habitable. And antarctica is closer.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
Actually, I really do spend most of my time working pencil to paper. Sure, I do simulations on a computer for some things, and I've used analytic programs for others, but most of the time calculations in my field are done by hand. Sometimes because you're working on a simple enough idea from a new perspective or because you're dealing with mathematical objects for which there is no analytic program.
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.
There are two ways to take your comment: you either want me to pay for what you value, yet you don't want to pay for what I value; or you think that people should only pay for what they value themselves.
From prior experience, most people will claim the latter but mean the former. After all, as soon as you outline the consequences (i.e. cutting funding to their cherished programs) they start screaming bloody murder.
But just in case you claim the latter and actually mean the latter, have you ever considered the consequences? User pay ultimately means that funding is unstable. User pay ultimately means that most programs will be underfunded because people are far more willing to pay for things that tangibly affect their life. And I'm talking about things like bridge maintenance here. Or schools, because some people don't value education (never mind being able to afford it). Oh, and who's going to pay for the prisons once those uneducated bastards are thieving and murdering to make a living? The prisoners themselves? Giggle. :)
Yes, public funding is "fork it over or face the consequences". But most of them are broader social consequences. Quick frankly, I couldn't care less about what happens to people who choose not to pay taxes because they have too much of a "me-me" attitude to give a damn about.
That is pretty cool. I never was good enough at maths to be any use in mathematical modeling so I always marvel at the people who can do it :).
-- Cheers!
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.