Microryza - Grow the next generation of ideas
microryza.com
microryza.com
It won't. I'm sorry, but it just won't. There are several reasons why a kickstarter for academic/scientific research is doomed:
1) People underestimate the amount of money required to fund research. Starting this Fall, I'll be receiving a grant from the NSF for one year of funding. That funding pays me approx. $1800/mo, plus covers my health insurance ($800/mo), tuition ($5k/semester), and travel ($7000/yr). The university also provides me with facilities and access to faculty and thus have overhead that need to be covered. This grant is shared among 3 PhD students and totals over $180,000.
2) Progress does not happen in leaps and bounds, it happens in inches. Kickstarter projects go from conception or prototype to finished product. Research does not work that way. You go from previous algorithm to slightly updated algorithm. It's a marathon, not a sprint to production.
3) You get nothing. Kickstarter projects give you a cool gadget or game or piece of art or whatever. When you fund a Kickstarter project, you get to see a video of some prototype or sketches that look like they'll be awesome. By the end of it, it's finished and you have this cool new thing that you can enjoy. You will not get any cool new thing from researchers, because they don't even know what it is they're trying to make yet. At best they will produce a conference or journal paper, maybe with a neat little demo of low production quality, and then they're on to the next problem. Scientists are not interested in building production-ready toys, they are searching purely for knowledge. So you as the funder get nothing tangible.
4) Most science is boring to the average person. Researchers live on the edge of human knowledge. They are tackling problems for which there is no known answer. Odds are, if you're in a sexy area like neuroscience, robotics, etc., then the problems you want to solve have been looked at for decades by people much smarter than you. Thus, you are not going to make some gigantic breakthrough that leads to strong AI-- you're hopefully going to develop a new learning algorithm that performs 3% better than the state of the art on a handful of benchmark datasets. Exciting, right?
Overall, it'd be great if we had democratized funding that worked. Unfortunately, due to the costly, slow, intangible, esoteric nature of scientific research, it's unlikely that will happen. Most academics have a hard enough time convincing experts, who have dedicated their lives to the area, that their work is worth funding. I just don't see how it could possibly work.
What if you don't see any interesting results in your research? That's an inherent risk of research. People giving you money should be aware of that.
What if you don't produce anything tangible to give away? Depending on your goals, that's a real possibility. People giving you money should be aware of that.
What if people don't want to give you money? People giving you money should be aware of... well, okay, that doesn't make sense. If you managed to convince people to give you money, then we're okay on that point.
An example: what tangible benefit do people get out of donating to universities? A tax write-off? I guess, but is that really the reason why people donate? What about to the Salvation Army? Or to whatever non-profit org? People donate because they want to help and support the mission. I don't see why it couldn't be the same with scientific research.
What's the problem? Well, doing real scientific research is hard and time-consuming. Just trying to catch up with what's already known in your field of choice takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you're unplugged from the community, and then taking it to the next level by actually discovering something new is far harder. The average PhD student works for several years, full time, before they do their first piece of truly worthwhile work, and in 99 percent of cases we're still not talking about anything significant enough to satisfy your average hobbyist with dreams of scientific glory. Also the average PhD student has access to a zillion things which a hobbyist doesn't, most importantly an advisor who understands the field and knows what approaches are likely to be worthwhile. So for a hobbyist-scientist, we're talking four to five years of all your spare time spent trying to produce one or two papers that probably won't make a big impact. Doesn't sound enticing.
Crackpots, of course, get to take a short cut. Crackpots get the thrill of being a Great Scientist Who Discovered Something Important without the tedious mess involved with actually learning the field and doing science. Crackpots occur when you take the desire for scientific glory and subtract scientific understanding and self-awareness. They're inevitably extremely satisfied with their work, even if they're angry that nobody will take them seriously.
In short, though, anyone with the brains, the commitment and the love of science that you'd need to be a legitimate part-time citizen-scientist in this day and age has probably already found a way to be a full-time scientist instead.
The first are researchers at small liberal arts colleges. While these institutions specialize in teaching, their faculty are often pressured to publish, but not given a lot of funding or time to write grants. If I were teaching at a small liberal arts college, I'd seriously consider this as an alternate funding model.
The second group consists of people who do research that is really interesting to a small subset of individuals, but not particularly well funded. My lab in graduate school specialized in aging research. While I was there the funding situation was brutal, and somewhere around ninety percent of the grants in our area were being rejected. There's no way a project like Microryza could have covered the costs of the entire lab, but a direct appeal to the singularity-crowd might have brought in enough to help keep things working smoothly while times were tough.
I wish more projects told me what they intended to do with the money, though. For example, why does the mathematician need $2200 to investigate neural network stability? Is it to buy a bunch of GPUs? Or to pay an intern? Or to buy ramen for himself? I found the projects that gave that detail ($1200 to go to Costa Rica and collect tissue samples from 5 butterflies, $1100 for components for an analogue computer plus an intern) more compelling because it feels like I'm enabling something concrete.
How are you guys differentiating your site from Petridish.org? http://www.petridish.org/