CyberSightings

In the Spotlight

Scientific research is the main driver of innovation, economic development, and social wealth. However, because of the economic crisis, Western countries are cutting their research budget. Recently, a new strategy has emerged for alleviating academic poverty: crowdfunding. This process is defined by Wikipedia as “the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.” The term crowdfunding was first mentioned in 2006 by Michael Sullivan on his Web site Fundavlog (original citation: http://www.wordspy.com/words/crowdfunding.asp). In the last few years, crowdfunding has been applied to many different fields, from music (e.g., Sell a Band) to citizen journalism (e.g., Spot.us), to creative projects (e.g., Kickstarter), to political campaigns (e.g., the presidential run of Barak Obama). The idea of crowdfunding, however, is not new; Joseph Pulitzer used a form of crowdfunding to finance the Statue of Liberty, as reported by Kevin Lawton and Dan Marom in their book The Crowdfunding Revolution. Thanks to the emergence of Web 2.0, this approach has become increasingly pervasive, with more than 170 crowdfunding sites existing online. One of the most successful initiatives is Kiva Microfund, a not-for-profit organization that allows people to lend money via the Internet to finance institutions in developing countries. As of September 2010, Kiva has distributed over $160,000,000 in loans, and its Web site ranks in the top 15,000 Web sites on the Internet (source: Alexa).

With the growing popularity of microfinancing, it was only a matter of time before the scientific community realized the potential of this approach. Over the last few years, several scientific crowdfunding initiatives have taken off. Organizations such as EurekaFund, SciFlies, FundScience, and the Open Source Science project are connecting citizens with research projects they might like to help fund. Although these initiatives are slightly different in scope, they operate a similar funding process. A pool of experts qualifies the research proposals through peer review, and decides which projects get crowdfunded. Once a project is qualified and posted to the Web, investors examine these projects and choose to fund the ideas they find to be most interesting. Finally, the organization transfers the donations to the researchers, who in turn are requested to report on their progress online, using a language understandable by citizens without a scientific background. The type of projects funded is quite heterogeneous across these organizations. For example, MyProjects focuses exclusively on cancer research, whereas SciFlies supports different kinds of projects, broken down by discipline (from math to biology). Despite their differences, these scientific crowdfunding initiatives share common objectives: to increase the resources for research; to reduce the gap between science and the public; to enhance transparency in funding allocation and utilization; and to inform donors about the results of their investments. Since these objectives and needs are widely recognized, what if the research community could develop a unique crowdfunding platform, using open source software? The open nature of this initiative would allow the entire scientific community to identify needs, explore options, and propose implementation steps. In this way, the platform would evolve through community cooperation: an international accessible resource created by researchers for researchers. Such an open crowdfunding platform could be managed by a not-for profit organization that is dependent on volunteer researchers who serve as developers, editors, and peer reviewers. Service administration and operating costs such as bandwidth and servers could be covered from: direct donations, cost percentage of raised funds, and philanthropic organizations that want to solve the long tail of non-funded projects. Of course, the development of this platform would require a participatory design approach, actively involving all stakeholders (e.g. donors, scientific institutions, charities, researchers) in the requirements definition process to ensure that the final platform meets their needs.

Scientific research is the main driver of economic development, innovation, and social wealth. Crowdfunding is a potential effective strategy to cope with the lack of investment in science. For this goal to be accomplished, the active collaboration of the research community and the public is required.

Internet Corner

In this issue, we feature a list of selected web resources related to crowdfunding:

Jumo (www.jumo.com/). Jumo is a new crowdfunding site designed exclusively for social activism. Launched by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, the service helps users find causes that mean a lot to them, and strengthens their ties with other activists. As of December 2010, the site lists about 3500 organizations, but any group with a mission can create their own Jumo page.

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