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Scanning through the website (Experiment.com) I am both surprised and elated at how many projects seem to be 100% funded.
Scanning through the website (Experiment.com) I am both surprised and elated at how many projects seem to be 100% funded.
Sadly the stats aren't that good. From the article "Two years on and with a smart name change, “Experiment” has launched 5,058 projects and funded 336 of them" so still a long way to go - Kickstarter's success rate I think is around 40%. That's still 336 research projects that wouldn't have been funded otherwise! Go Cindy!
Scanning through the website (Experiment.com) I am both surprised and elated at how many projects seem to be 100% funded.
Sadly the stats aren't that good. From the article "Two years on and with a smart name change, “Experiment” has launched 5,058 projects and funded 336 of them" so still a long way to go - Kickstarter's success rate I think is around 40%. That's still 336 research projects that wouldn't have been funded otherwise! Go Cindy!
I shudder to imagine how much the experiment.com domain must have cost.
I shudder to imagine how much the experiment.com domain must have cost.
I shudder to imagine how much the experiment.com domain must have cost.
That doesn't seem to be experiment.com yet, or indeed any of the organizations trying to crack the same nut of how you make crowdfunding work for research projects. We wouldn't do any better with them than we do with our own hacked-together infrastructure and communication channels. We need the existence of a large successful science crowdfunding community before it is worth our trying to surf on that science crowdfunding community, and I'm sure we're not the only people with that chicken and egg situation.
Some folk in the community have had luck with indiegogo.com for scientific research projects, such as mouse gene therapy or immune transfer treatments in European labs at a few tens of thousands of dollars, but even there I think it is a case that you are buying infrastructure for the audience you bring to the table, not buying fresh faces and new listeners to persuade to your point of view.
I'm vaguely hopeful that among the competitors in this space someone will come up with something that works and scales and pulls in the crowds, the halo of attention. There are some quite different styles of approach floating around, such as labcures.com that implements a "back a team" strategy, or lifespan.io that'll be launching sometime soon. Perhaps one of them will gain more traction. Experimentation is key.
We also, because of the wonderful system of peer review, pretty much only give grants to old established researchers with long track records. These scientists are great at running mini-empires, but not so good at coming up with the really novel ideas that we so need.
What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. At the moment all scientists have to live from grant to grant which makes it near impossible to go after the really risky projects. If you try a difficult project and fail then you are out of a job. We also, because of the wonderful system of peer review, pretty much only give grants to old e…
Sounds like some IT departments I know.