Ask Slashdot: Crowdfunding For Science — Can It Succeed? 153
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?"
Re:$40,000? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wordpress.com] 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 [rockethub.com]. It's not huge, but it's what is needed for the kind of data I collect.
Needs vary greatly between disciplines and projects.
Small Money does not mean Small Science (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bottom line (Score:2, Interesting)
Science by Popularity? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Shoving the current buzzword down our throats (Score:3, Interesting)
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.