Protei on Nature.com - crowd-funding science projects

http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html
Kerri Smith

http://www.nature.com/news/finding-philanthropy-like-it-pay-for-it-1.9815
Jim Gilles


2012/01/19 Kerri Smith & Cesar Harada

In October 2010, Cesar Harada found himself in New Orleans with little money and a big idea. Harada, an engineer, had been working on oil-spill mitigation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. But he quit the lab in frustration at what he saw as a slow pace of work and a focus on expensive solutions. He travelled south to join the clean-up operation for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Once there, his mind turned to a futuristic solution: a low-cost clean-up robot that local people could build and deploy themselves. Yet his two criteria for the project — a quick build and open-source intellectual property — all but ruled out academic or industrial funding.

Harada turned to Kickstarter, a website used by authors, film-makers and artists in search of project funding. He uploaded a pitch, set a goal of raising US$27,500 and listed a series of small rewards for donors. Then he started to network furiously. Money came in from friends and engineering colleagues. A few companies heard about his idea; they pitched in several thousand dollars each. Word reached people he had never met, and they contributed too. When Harada's funding appeal closed in April 2011, he had raised almost $34,000 — enough to assemble a team of engineers and build a prototype of the clean-up robot.

Public interest
If Harada's experience sounds like a one-off, think again. Crowd-funding — raising money for research directly from the public — looks set to become increasingly common. Established platforms such as Kickstarter are wooing scientists. And similar websites dedicated to connecting scientists with potential funders are being built, or have already launched. The public seems to be responding. Last year, for example, a group of scientists wanting to map water quality along the Mississippi River raised $64,000 in a trial project on an online crowd-funding platform called the Open Source Science Project (OSSP).

Nature 481, 252--253 (19 January 2012) doi:10.1038/481252a

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