Positive Technology Journal

The September issue of Nature Neuroscience has an editorial about the use of microfinance for scientific research.

The editorial is a sign of growing interest from the research community toward this strategy, which I and my colleague Giuseppe Riva described in a letter to Science [Gaggioli, A, Riva, G. (2008) Working the Crowd, Science 321, 5895, 1443]

Recently, we have teamed up with the Institute of Physiology of the National Research Council and the Italian Federation of Rare Diseases to develop Open Genius, a crowdfunding platform for research in rare diseases.

We have also created a website (in Italian and English) where you can find updated information about the project.

Open Genius is a not-for-profit initative of the scientific community that partners with like minded entities including academic, philantropic, government funding agencies.

If you want to collaborate or propose a partnership you can write us to:

info(at)opengenius.org

Several initiatives are exploring the potential of crowdfunding for supporting scientific research. In this approach, that I described in a letter to Science donors can choose from a list of public projects. Projects seeking funding are stored in an online repository. Investors (either people or funding agencies) can decide which projects to fund.

The closest example of crowdfunding science is Cancer Research UK's MyProjects scheme (http://myprojects.cancerresearchuk.org/). Launched in October 2008, MyProjects allows Cancer Research UK donors to search projects by type of cancer and location to find a specific research project to donate money.

I am also running a crowdfunding-science project in Italy, called Open Genius. The website is available only in Italian, but you can find the essential info about the project in this presentation.

I wish to hear your comments about this!

Wanna make money with your blog? Do you have quality content that you would like to monetize? Now you can do it, with a revolutionary micropayment system called Flattr.

The system was launched publicly in March 2010 on an invite-only basis, and then opened up to the public in August 2010.

How does it work? 

You pay a small monthly amount (using either Moneybookers or PayPal) and then click buttons on sites to share out the money you paid in among those sites, sort of like an Internet tip jar. The minimum to pay is 2 euros per month. The money payed each month is spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month. In this way, users share not only money, but also content. For the service, Flattr keeps 10% of all the users monthly flatrate.

What is interesting about this service is that not only sites which support Flattr, but all sites, can have Flattr buttons.

Good Flattr to everybody!

I and my colleague Giuseppe Riva have just published a letter in Science, where we propose crowd-funding - a form of crowdsourcing applied to finance - as a possible strategy to cope with the lack of investments in research.

The full text of the article is available here: gaggioli_riva_science08.pdf

Video (Italian only)