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What do you call it when tens of thousands of volunteer birdwatchers pay for their own personal efforts (in time and money) to do bird monitoring in the UK? Cum
by troymc 13y ago
What do you call it when tens of thousands of volunteer birdwatchers pay for their own personal efforts (in time and money) to do bird monitoring in the UK? Cumulatively that's a lot of money, not "small potatoes."
http://www.bto.org/about-bto http://www.bto.org/about-bto
The BTO isn't the only example. There are many others (e.g. the BOINC projects, Planet Hunters, EyeWire, The Amateur Sky Survey).
Maybe you'll object, saying that's not "crowdfunding." If it's not, then what is it? There's definitely funding being spent, on scientific research, by "the crowd" (i.e. the general public).
- toufka 13y agoIt is, and those are great examples. But it's only accessible to the most sexy, most accessible, most 'fun' disciplines. The harder stuff just cannot be crowd-sourced right now. Biomedical research is expensive, dull, and removed from most peoples' experience, and so it'd be very difficult to get a crowd interested in funding basic biomedical research.
- xerophtye 13y agoBut i think Biomedical can still attract people. Nobody likes diseases. everyone would be ok to contribute to eliminating diseases or coming up with better cures/surgeries. What's tough, is to get funding for weird theoretical quantum mechanics stuff. How do you ask for funding to things people have absolutely no idea about?
- tlarkworthy 13y agomaybe you could crowd fund the first expensive study into CACK-3 protein that may or may not be related to disease X. But after the 100th randomly named protein investigation people are going to be bored and sceptical it makes progress. These studies just say protein X seems to be related to protein Y. It takes an excruciatingly long time to make progress on the high level goal of understanding a pathology. I bet half the bio people doing experiments don't even know why they are doing them either.
- epaladin 13y agoYup, it's usually a case of trying to interpret what the PI told you to do. They usually don't have time to actually explain the context. Or to make sure that what they're requesting isn't something entirely impossible.
- shiven 13y agoClassic example highlighting the difference between Research/Discovery vs Development. Kickstarter and their crowd-funding ilk are fine when it comes to Developing a product but good luck getting funding for anything as iffy as R&D, more so in the biomedical realm.
- Fomite 13y ago"An edge case" where science has managed to hop-along with someone's hobby. I can come up with examples as well, but they're not even really a blip on the radar screen as far as science funding is concerned.