Show HN: Microryza, crowdfunding research AND sharing results
microryza.com
microryza.com
I hope you motivate a lot of new interest and exchange of knowledge. Also, try to get some disease-related projects in the future; I think people will go crazy over those.
Seriously though, if chance ever brings you Seattle give me a shout!
Love the idea. Hope it catches on.
BTW, I did just donate a small amount to the chili project. One more piece of feedback. My real name shows up on the donation page. Not a big deal, but I'd prefer if my user name appeared there instead. I'd like to remain semi-anonymous.
Just hold tight, hopefully you'll enjoy having donated to the project. :)
It doesn't bother me that the project (or the site) knows my real name. However, I feel better if future employers of mine don't know about my love of hot chilis :-)
You know, if you want to do some sort of regular feedback thing, we'll always be willing to listen to you! Let us know on the feedback page if you ever come up with other ideas. We really really appreciate it.
I feel like the about us section could use a little bit of touch up. It seemed a little redundant.
Congrats on the launch!
I'll take a look at the overlap soon, and fair point about the about us section. We'll work on revising it.
Instead, we want to make people realize that the research process itself is sexy. And that in itself is a social experience.
The vast majority of scientific research simply doesn't fit in that model. Newton's work leading up to the Principia Mathematica simply did not have a cool-sounding elevator pitch. Neither did Einstein's early investigations into the photoelectric effect that led to relativity.
My problem with crowdfunding research is the exact same problem that increasingly occurs with ultra-scarce research grants: research effort is diverted into advertising and into projects that are easy to advertise to broad audiences, at the cost of deep research.
So then we have to ask ourselves, for a value of "sexy" being "easy to advertise and explain", do we want research to be sexy? If not, why should we require it to be sexy?
At least that's what we decided. If you make your elevator pitch about how you are guaranteeing a cure for cancer, maybe you're sacrificing value. But if you make the pitch about the process and steps, while validating basic things like fraud, ability, capacity, then maybe you're onto something.