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Crowd sourced scientific funding is a fine way of supplementing existing infrastructure and it's good for funding small side-projects that augment existing gran

by nmrm2 11y ago

Crowd sourced scientific funding is a fine way of supplementing existing infrastructure and it's good for funding small side-projects that augment existing grants / research groups. It's also a good way for amatuers to get a hobby project funded. But it's not an adequate alternative to more traditional forms of scientific funding, for a lot of reasons. First, the amounts are just too small. Even a very successful crowd funder would have an incredibly difficult time paying for a single full time employee, even at grad student rates and even before administrative overhead / tuition. Which is essentially $10-$15/hr. Second, if you look at sites like experiment.com, it's rare for a project to be funded without a very clear picture for what questions are being asked, how they are being asked, and exactly how they will be answered. And none of the projects I found asked to recoup that cost. This is particularly problematic for fundamental research, where scope and intent are not well-defined almost by definition. (Being a cynic, I'd be unsurprised if a lot of the people doing the crowd funding thing in small dollar amounts are mostly just in it for the sex appeal it will have on their next grant report, rather than e.g. actually needing the money. There are often way easier ways to scrounge up a few thousand bucks at a major research university. Heck, were I did grad school, you could get grants in the small thousands just for being a grad student with a pulse, and doubling that money was about as easy.)

dluan 11y ago
> sex appeal Actually, it's the other way around. Granting agency budgets are so constrained that funders are looking for heuristics to de-risk their funding decisions.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  You're fooling yourself (or someone is fooling you). The small numbers just don't make sense. $1k-10k is such a miniscule portion of the total cost of even a grad student+. No PI with even the vaguest hint of a conscience is using uncertain 1k-10k increments as anything other than purely supplementary funding; if one project doesn't work out your student is done. In fact, I doubt that most universities would even let a professor take on/keep a student with that sort of funding scheme. And it certainly wouldn't be enough for a tenure case. You do realize that the average CS professor in the US spends many thousands of dollars per year, just on conference travel, just for themselves, right? $5k or even $10k for a side project really isn't substantive. + which in the sciences is usually in the mid five to low six figure range, before the cost of lab materials, travel, etc.
  - dluan 11y ago
    Of course, no one has yet funded their entire PhD this way. It is however a fantastic way to fund a conference trip. There've been quite a few successful projects funding conference presentations or travel. In my experience speaking with program officers and grant reviewers, particularly NSF, the public or 'broader impact' section of a grant application is starting to grow in importance, because like I said above, it's become a way for grantees to stand apart from the growing number of applicants. So having more to put in that section certainly helps, and I do know that it's come up with a few tenure committees (successfully). It just depends on who, where you are, what field, etc. CSE is always a bit of an outlier, given the lower costs but still. I realize your hostility is towards the notion of someone being entirely alternatively funded, which we've never claimed to do.
    - nmrm2 11y ago
      > and I do know that it's come up with a few tenure committees If you're saying what I think you are, then that's exactly what I meant by the sex appeal comment. Regardless of how it's talked about, people aren't treating it as an alternative; rather, it's a particularly sexy supplement (because it's new and because it addresses dissimination / public awareness / education broader impact criteria that their more traditional sources of funding care about). So even though they could have picked up 2k in travel funding from a random pool of university cash or just funded everything out of an existing grant, they do the crowd funding thing instead for the sex appeal factor. But it's also possible that's not the case, they really need the money, and I've just spent too much time around the wrong types of academics. > I realize your hostility is towards the notion of someone being entirely alternatively funded, which we've never claimed to do. I don't mean to sound hostile. Maybe incredulous. Your earlier posts certainly sounded like you were proposing an alternative :-) Anyhow, good luck.

by nmrm2 11y ago

dluan 11y ago

> sex appeal Actually, it's the other way around. Granting agency budgets are so constrained that funders are looking for heuristics to de-risk their funding decisions.

nmrm2 11y ago
You're fooling yourself (or someone is fooling you). The small numbers just don't make sense. $1k-10k is such a miniscule portion of the total cost of even a grad student+. No PI with even the vaguest hint of a conscience is using uncertain 1k-10k increments as anything other than purely supplementary funding; if one project doesn't work out your student is done. In fact, I doubt that most universities would even let a professor take on/keep a student with that sort of funding scheme. And it certainly wouldn't be enough for a tenure case. You do realize that the average CS professor in the US spends many thousands of dollars per year, just on conference travel, just for themselves, right? $5k or even $10k for a side project really isn't substantive. + which in the sciences is usually in the mid five to low six figure range, before the cost of lab materials, travel, etc.
- dluan 11y ago
  Of course, no one has yet funded their entire PhD this way. It is however a fantastic way to fund a conference trip. There've been quite a few successful projects funding conference presentations or travel. In my experience speaking with program officers and grant reviewers, particularly NSF, the public or 'broader impact' section of a grant application is starting to grow in importance, because like I said above, it's become a way for grantees to stand apart from the growing number of applicants. So having more to put in that section certainly helps, and I do know that it's come up with a few tenure committees (successfully). It just depends on who, where you are, what field, etc. CSE is always a bit of an outlier, given the lower costs but still. I realize your hostility is towards the notion of someone being entirely alternatively funded, which we've never claimed to do.
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    > and I do know that it's come up with a few tenure committees If you're saying what I think you are, then that's exactly what I meant by the sex appeal comment. Regardless of how it's talked about, people aren't treating it as an alternative; rather, it's a particularly sexy supplement (because it's new and because it addresses dissimination / public awareness / education broader impact criteria that their more traditional sources of funding care about). So even though they could have picked up 2k in travel funding from a random pool of university cash or just funded everything out of an existing grant, they do the crowd funding thing instead for the sex appeal factor. But it's also possible that's not the case, they really need the money, and I've just spent too much time around the wrong types of academics. > I realize your hostility is towards the notion of someone being entirely alternatively funded, which we've never claimed to do. I don't mean to sound hostile. Maybe incredulous. Your earlier posts certainly sounded like you were proposing an alternative :-) Anyhow, good luck.