Kickstarting

Thomas Lin has an article in The New York Times about crowd-financing:

In January, a time when many scientists concentrate on grant proposals, Jennifer D. Calkins (photo) and Jennifer M. Gee, both biologists, were busy designing quail t-shirts and trading cards. The t-shirts went for twelve dollars each, and the trading cards for fifteen dollars, in a fund-raising effort resembling an online bake sale. The $4,873 they raised, mostly from small donations, will pay their travel, food, lab, and equipment expenses to study the elegant quail this fall in Mexico.
“Each radio transmitter costs $135,” said Dr. Gee, interim manager of the Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station in Claremont, Calif. “The receiver used to track birds is a thousand to two thousand dollars.”
As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom and generosity of the crowds will come to their rescue. While nonprofit science organizations and medical research centers commonly seek donations from the public, Dr. Calkins, an adjunct professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and Dr. Gee may have been the first professional scientists to use a generic “crowd funding” website to underwrite basic research.
In May of 2010, neither had the principal investigator status required to apply through their institutions for a National Science Foundation grant. But they were eager to begin collecting data about the behavior, appearance, distribution, habitat selection, and phylogenic position of the least-studied quail species in the Callipepla genus.
Dr. Calkins, who has published research papers and poetry, turned to the community of artists and microphilanthropists at Kickstarter.com. Her plea to potential backers on the site: “By contributing to this project, you will support a study of this little known species as we examine its behavior and evolution in its natural habitat, a space encroached upon by both urban sprawl and tension surrounding narcotics trafficking.”
Websites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and RocketHub are an increasingly popular way to bankroll creative projects, usually in film, music, and the visual arts. It is not likely that anyone imagined they would be used to finance scientific research, and it is unclear what problems this odd pairing might beget.
Most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion, but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process. Instead, money talks: the public decides which projects are worth pursuing by fully financing them. Kickstarter takes a five percent cut when those projects meet or exceed their fund-raising goals. When pledges fall short of a goal, donors pay nothing. The money can come from anywhere: the biggest backers of the quail project were ranchers and hunters.
“Both of us had some hesitation,” Dr. Gee said. “We were sort of afraid we’d lose some legitimacy in the eyes of other scientists. It’s not a peer-reviewed process. I was just ready to do anything it took to do my research.”
For Dr. Calkins and Dr. Gee, who received their Ph.D.s in 2001 and 2003, respectively, crowd funding is just one more way to scrape together a patchwork of funding and incremental bits of research aimed at larger goals. “I have had to be opportunistic about keeping my research going,” Dr. Gee wrote in an email. “I collect data guerrilla style — when and where I can! I think my story is typical.”
Ten years ago, Andrea Gaggioli wanted to conduct research on virtual reality and neural rehabilitation. But, he said, “in Italy it’s almost impossible to get funded if you are under thirty.” Now 37 and a psychology and technology researcher at Catholic University of Milan, Dr. Gaggioli talks to anyone who will listen about his Open Genius Project, a crowd funding initiative he hopes will provide seed money for breakthrough research. Dr. Gaggioli plans to set up a peer review process to “separate garbage from good science”. But his crowd funding dream itself needs funds before it can begin accepting proposals. “I think people will invest in projects that are carried out by young people who have no other possibilities to put forward their ideas,” Dr. Gaggioli said.
Cancer Research UK, a London-based charity, took a webpage from the microfinance site Kiva when it started its MyProjects initiative in September of 2008. “The basic premise was to let people choose which cancers they want to beat,” said Ryan Bromley, the charity’s online communities manager.
In the crowd funding genus, MyProjects is a different species from Kickstarter. All projects on the site have been vetted by scientists and already receive financing from Cancer Research UK. And the funds are guaranteed regardless of whether the MyProjects goal is reached. Bromley calls it “substitutional funding. We’re trying to attract people to fund-raise in a different way that we haven’t done before,” he said.
The £818,450 ($1.3 million) that MyProjects has raised since 2008 is a tiny fraction of the £334 million ($534 million) the parent charity gave to cancer researchers in the 2009-10 fiscal year alone. There are currently 28 projects on the site, with an emphasis on the most common cancers: breast, lung, and prostate. But the site is continuing to adapt and grow. “We’re using social media as much as possible,” Bromley said. The MyProjects Facebook page has been “liked” by more than 75,000 people. The site has videos of patients’ success stories as well as researchers. Science is a point of interest, Bromley said, but the human element is “a bit more motivating than the science alone.”
It’s too soon to tell how widespread science crowd funding will become. Would a geology project on organic sedimentary rocks, for example, open as many wallets as the charismatic quail?
“It starts when one person in a community proposes a project,” said Yancey Strickler, a founder of Kickstarter, “and then all of a sudden they start seeing proposals from five others in that community.” That chain reaction appears to have begun at Evergreen, a public liberal arts college.
The success of the Calkins-Gee quail project inspired Alison Styring, a member of Evergreen’s environmental studies faculty, to submit a Kickstarter proposal titled Mapping the Bornean Soundscape. “It’s getting harder and harder to get funding,” said Dr. Styring, who hopes to raise $15,000 to record the sounds of Tawau Hills Park in Malaysian Borneo and study birds there.
Saddled with a busy teaching schedule, Dr. Styring was writing student evaluations in January when the last National Science Foundation grant deadline came and went. Relatively low-cost field projects like hers, she said, are not typically financed by the foundation. But Dr. Styring was not sure if crowd funding would work for her or what rewards to offer as an incentive to potential donors. “Maybe musicians could use the sounds,” she said.
In addition to t-shirts and trading cards, Dr. Calkins and Dr. Gee offered postcards for donations of five dollars, quail leg bands for ten dollars, pre-ordered signed copies of The Quail Diaries for $35, prints for $45, illustrations for $75, adopting and naming a quail for $100, and a guided tour of California quail for $500. “What we found was the majority of people pledged for the book,” Dr. Calkins said.
The quail project was one of thousands that Cassie Marketos, a community editor at Kickstarter, has approved. “It’s one thing to buy a book about quails,” she said. “But to know that you played a small part in making it happen is a much different experience.”

Rico says he's gonna see if IndieGoGo will work for funding his docudrama: