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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?"
...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.
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.
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.
Government funding is the ultimate crowdsourcing.
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
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!
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.
I'll answer the question originally posed. And I think the answer is, for the most part, no. Most of the diverse projects funded by SciFund Challenge have goals in the hundreds of dollars or in the low thousands. While there are some science project you can do for a few thousand dollars, the are the minority rather than the majority. You also have be primarily talking about projects run by people who aren't getting paid to run these projects (i.e. professors paid with tax dollars an tuition). A more realistic scale for a small science project is two full time early career scientists, which, with benefits and overhead is going to run you $250k/yr, now add what it's going to cost to do the experiments. There's no way you are going to be able fund that on donations unless people perceive a immediate benefit to themselves.
You can probably guess from the signature, I'm a fan of SETI@home. From a couple hundred thousand SETI@home users, they manage to raise $50k/yr. That's not great for a project that costs $500k/yr to run. It could be worse. The Allen Telescope Array run by the SETI Institute (unrelated to SETI@home) costs about $1.5M/yr to operate. In their funding drive, the SETI Institute raise $200k to bring the ATA back on-line. If it's still back on-line, I don't know where the rest of the money is coming from.
In other words, no, I have no faith in the ability of "crowdfunding" to act as a stable funding source for any non-trivial science project, and even then I think much of the funding will go to people who are already funded (at least in terms of salary), and just see a means to squeeze a few extra bucks into their research programs. Except, of course, in the case of "one's a crowd". The rich in this country control most of the wealth and income. Why ask for money from the peasants? Since we're moving our economies back into the feudal model, if I were a scientist looking for funding, I would probably be searching for a wealthy patron. Chief Alchemist to the Court of Gates, perhaps?
Support SETI@home
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.
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.
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)
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...
Like it or not, the government of the United States is designed to get its power from the consent of the people. The government IS the people.
If someone comes to your door and drags you out of your house for not paying taxes, it's because American citizens, as a group, have agreed be subject to such a law to make sure nobody tries to dodge their responsibility to ante up so that there can be roads, health care, a military, etc. While we don't require unanimous votes on these issues, if there was sufficient will the entire government could be changed top to bottom in a relatively short time.
The danger is not from government, it is from outside, non-citizen, non-human entities wresting control of government institutions from the people, as has been the case with the rise of the corporate oligarchy abetted by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, in which an activist, rogue court inexplicably decided that corporations are "super-citizens" who have more influence over government than actual citizens.
In the US we are not bound to an aristocracy, a royalty or a military dictatorship. Without exception, every two years the entire House of Representatives stands for election. Every six years the entire Senate stands for election, and every four years the President stands for election.
I'm sorry that you believe that some outside agency is going to "drag you out of your house and throw you in jail", but you are not without influence. Americans have, decade after decade, voted that people who try to skip out on their civic responsibility can, in rare instances, be arrested and prosecuted and thrown in jail. It hardly ever happens, the jail part, except to people whose disregard of their responsibility to the community borders on sociopathy.
That's bullshit and you know it. I don't think "half the population" need a gun pointed at their head to realize that "getting science done" is a worthwhile endeavor for public resources. And for the most part, drama queens like yourself are ignored. Even so, you are free to try to convince your fellow citizens, though judging by the "anti-tax, anti-government" movement I've seen in the past few years, I doubt you'll find many who are physically fit enough to try to toss a few pallet-loads of tea into Boston Harbor, and the real progeny of the Boston Tea Party are busy trying to bring the biggest sociopaths to account via public demonstrations and protests in towns and cities all across the country.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You and I have been over this before.
A person doesn't have the right to drag me out of my house and shoot me. How do 10, 100, 1000, or 100,000,000 people acquire that right when as individuals they do not possess it?
They don't acquire that right; their actions never acquire a veneer of morality. They merely assert violence. And they are moral monsters.
The US is not foundationally a democracy, by the way. But I've explained this to you before. The nature of who and how the laws are made is basically irrelevant to the moral correctness of a society; there was originally some debate as to whether or not George Washington ought to be our first King as opposed to our first president.
By "half the population", I refer of course to the half that actually fund the federal government. The dependant half obviously never have anything pointed at them except fistfulls of my money. Those of us who provide may see the value in doing basic fundamental research and may already be funding it independantly of the amount that is currently coercively extracted.
That doesn't change the basic claim that I made: that currently, the US government pays for science via the veiled threat of breaking into homes and dragging people out, guns drawn.
Gary Johnson would be someone who would agree with much of what I say; he's a two-term governor and has climbed the highest mountain on most (if not all) the world's continents. I don't know who you think you know in "my" movement but I am happy with the physical and intellectual abilities of the few I'd consider my comrades.
For that matter, Ron Paul, now in his late 70s, challenged the other GOP "contenders" to a bike race through Houston in the summer heat. Nobody took him up on it.
In my conversations with you and others, a theme reoccurs. Nobody attempts to justify the morality of what they endorse, nobody questions the ethics of what I am suggesting. Everyone instead bitches about things I haven't discussed and may or may not agree with, and they posit that my stements represent an irrelevant marginal portion of society.
I don't mind being in the minority; I find that most of the progress of humanity has been the case of better ideas held in small numbers slowly overcoming poorer ideas held in larger numbers.
When you can explain to me why you think federal government funding of science is constitutional or ethical, I'd be happy to hear your explanation. But if history is any guide, the best you'll do is tell me that my ideas don't matter and I'm going to be stuck with yours whether I like it or not. And while you're probably correct, you still won't have answered the challenge, nor will you have successfully blanketed your naked opportunistic murderous lust for power with any veneer of morality at all.
Your move.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.