Slashdot Mirror
Microryza Brings Crowd-Funding To Scientific Research
Zothecula writes "Crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter have proven popular for groups and individuals looking to get a consumer product, movie, music or video game project off the ground. Now a group of researchers and scientists is adopting a similar crowd-funding model to raise money for scientific research projects. The Microryza website, which launched this week, lets the public get behind research they care about and maybe help it get out of the lab."
We need to get away from this mindset that it's OK to let rich people have more of a say in charity (which includes academic research) than poor - it simply doesn't work.
There's a reason China's winning while the West's in the shitter: long term, high investment projects such as academia, infrastructure and industry are lifted up and celebtrated by Chinese government, while America and the UK have little interest in helping anyone but the banker. You tax and then you assign the money to projects which will help the country.
(and those who do not want to live in society, are welcome to reject *all* its advances and protections)
What's the point of linking to the useless "Gizmag" article when the Slashdot summary contains basically the exact same content? Furthermore, why the hell does the "Gizmag" article even exist, when at the bottom of it, it in turn links to an article at some "Ubergizmo" site that also says essentially the same thing?
Worst of all, the Slashdot summary doesn't even fucking link to the Microryza website!
Cutting out these useless middlemen blog articles and linking directly to the site being discussed is a lot more efficient, you know.
I was actively excited when I read TFS. Looking at TFA, though, there's something that I don't like the sound of at all:
Importantly, the researchers retain 100 percent ownership of their project and its results and get to choose how much material they disclose. While backers will generally like to keep apprised of project developments and findings, researchers aren’t obliged to provide updates.
They want money from crowdsourcing, but they want to keep their findings to themselves? I'm not on board with that at all. If science is funded by the kindness of 1000 enthusiasts, it isn't acceptable to claim that the results are strictly yours to do with what you want. If you want money from the public, you have to accepts that the results belong to the public. Or at least you should do, in my opinion.
Usually we let groups get away with claiming "ownership" over information on the basis that they need rewarding for their risky investment. If you take away that element, and they're not investing themselves, what right do they have to keep the information to themselves? To keep it away from "competitors"?
I wouldn't give a penny to a project without at least some show of faith that they're doing the research for the good of the world, and not for themselves.
This is because of a new law that passed in the last week or so.
Good news: crowd-sourcing of entrepreneurial dollars for small startups may really help some good companies, particularly where angel investing and venture capital financing are as hard to find as they are right now.
Bad news: there were huge concerns about due diligence/accounting/accountability/regulatory structure/people using this for scams (plus, of course, how many just plain *bad* business ideas there are out there). I don't know what they wound up doing to address these, or to what extent it will work. When doing angel investing or VC, the lender has lots of personal contact and the investment is for enough money that there is generally some significant amount of due diligence work done. ("So... does your company actually sell anything?")
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I want a pathogen named after me, dammit!
Cue all the nutters who believe (insert everyday technology) will cause (insert favourite ailment of choice), and will want to fund a project to prove their point.
This just seems like a bad idea. If you are researching a cure for disease that's one thing, but alot of research topics have camps (take global warming). I could see some of this descending to a place where a team with a reputation for one side of the subject collecting cash from people with a common point of view and magically end up with findings that support their bias. I guess at least the funding sources may be public unlike other situations but the last thing we need is polarization of research by the D's donating to this project and the R's donating to that.
10$ : Thanks.
100$ : Many thanks.
1000$ : Thanks!!!!11 We'll even say thanks in our published papers (acknowledgements)
This model might not work as it has with games and other media.
Just sayin'
Bring charity to an end. It only promotes the whims of a few to the surface.
Please, promote the serious, boring, long-winded analyses of research needs, whether for basic research or engineering efforts.
Let people who want tax deductions for charity put it into large, established arenas.
from his Contrary Brin blog:
"... how about crowd sourcing to help fund science research: Choose your own projects through Petridish: a crowdfunding site, where scientists can showcase their research to the public. In exchange, you will receive updates, acknowledgement and/or various rewards (photographs, DVD, field samples, journal acknowledgment, or invitations to talks/dinner), plus the satisfaction of assisting scientists trying to understand our world. (Donations are not currently tax deductible.) Way cool."
http://www.crowdsourcing.org/document/crowdfunding-new-law-opens-opportunities-risks/13257
And this is why: regular people aren't qualified to evaluate good research. They also aren't qualified to evaluate research progress. I don't think you can produce a sustainable system for funding without review from your peers. You need experts to look at a carefully designed research project and decide whether it's feasible, worth the investment and whether the researchers are qualified to do the work. A system built without peer review may be successful at first, but ultimately, it will lead to disappointment and wasted money. (That said, it would be better if there were a mechanism to donate your money directly to the NSF and NIH extramural research funding agencies with targets for, say, AIDS research or superconductors.)
I must have spent 10 minutes trying to get the website to give me the list of projects, preferably by theme, to which I failed.
All I can see is three random projects on the main page.
Those guys need to learn the basics of usability.
An essay I wrote on that from 2001: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
If university policies do not permit this, then universities should change their policies or other organizations could be supported.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.