SCIENCE FUNDING: AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

From Wired, an alternative to agencies and foundations for science funding: 3 different Kiva-style microfinance organizations that pool small donations from many individuals to fund particular projects. This kind of thing can't scale to anything NIH-like - the NIH's annual budget is literally one million times greater than the total raised by all three projects - but the process is interesting. Consider what your project proposal would have to look like if you were going through a source like EurekaFund. Instead of dense, highly technical, carefully footnoted proposals, you would need to produce a readily understandable summary web site, figure out ways to publicize your work, and have a proposal that is directed more at an educated lay audience.

All these things would be valuable exercises for scientists in general. For one thing, having more understandable explanations of the potential impact of one's work would likely make scientific witch hunts more difficult. Better dissemination mechanisms would likely also increase the impact of one's work - after all, your research does no good if nobody knows it exists.

Here's an interesting idea for the NSF: require that proposals include a 1-2 page summary suitable for an educated, non-specialist audience and include these summaries in their online database of proposals. Or better, request/require that funding recipients disseminate findings online and report the URL to the NSF so that results of work (including work in progress) can be included in the database of funded projects. That way the NSF can show impact.

An interesting thought experiment: imagine what the funding process would look like if grant recipients had to raise some minimum amount of funds (say, a few thousand dollars) from the general public, with self-funding and donations from family excluded