Dear colleagues,
For the last few years, we've been hearing more and more talk of
crowdfunding as a possible new pool of money for scientific projects.
As of yet, efforts have been sporadic and tepid at best. Although there
have been some high profile success stories (see
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/science/12crowd.html for a study of
the elegant quail), there is no clear guidance out there for how or if
crowdfunding can work for science.
My colleague, Jai Ranganathan and I, think that crowdfunding may be a
great untapped resource, paticularly for a discipline such as Ecology
where many discrete projects have smaller manageable budgets. So I
would like to announce the #SciFund Challenge with a website at
http://scifund.wordpress.com/about/ .
The #SciFund challenge is an effort to bring together scientists from a
variety of disciplines to attempt to use crowdfunding. It's a grand
experiment, where we will take the fall to work up and comment on each
others proposals, discuss the salient issues about crowdfunding and
science - both practical and philosophical - and then post our proposals
to a crowdfunding site of our choosing in the November. At the end, we
hope to do a post-mortem to see how, when, where, and why this potential
resource can be used to fund science into the future.
If you're interested, please visit the project site at
http://scifund.wordpress.com/ and/or signup at
http://scifund.wordpress.com/sign-up/ on the website.
We'll be blogging for the next month about what the project is and how
it will work. If you want more specific information, see these two posts
http://scifund.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/the-scifund-challenge-a-call-to-virtual-arms/
http://scifund.wordpress.com/2011/07/30/how-will-the-scifund-challenge-work/
or contact me or Jai directly. You can also follow the project on
twitter with the #SciFund hashtag. Please also feel free to also
comment on blog entries there or respond on your own blogs. There's a
lot to mull over here!
If you're interesting in crowdfunding in general, take a look at the ny
times artive above and sites such as http://www.rockethub.com/
-Jarrett
-----------------------------------------
Jarrett E. Byrnes
Postdoctoral Fellow
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
http://nceas.ucsb.edu/~byrnes
ph: 805.892.2512
