Sure! Point taken. What do you think it would take for it to work?
By the way the number you want is 860 projects launched. The 5,615 figure is people who've started working on a project but haven't launched. So closer to ~42% success rate.
That is, I'll admit, a much better success rate. Still not as high as I'd like, but I was honestly surprised by my ~7% figure - I didn't figure it was actually that bad.
I can't give you a specific figure, but off the cuff? I'd like to see decent numbers of projects regularly getting funded at the ~ 50K level. That would have a couple benefits:
- We're now talking about a year's funding for a postdoc/grad student/significant % effort for a prof. This is I think a fundamental hurdle. We can't pretend that crowdsourcing is a viable funding stream if someone else has to keep the payroll going.
- 50K is also about the level, at least in my field, where we can talk about long-term investment purchases. Equipment, computers, larger datasets...the kinds of things that are hard to put on a single project.
- That's also about the point where spending time on crowdfunding campaigns likely won't irk chairs, tenure committees, etc. A couple years back I asked the folks in the fiscal office at my department about how a ~3-5K crowdsourcing project would work, and I got serious side eye.
- It's also about where modest but decent pilot grants come in in my field generally.
That's great and very concrete, thanks. It's funny, at those levels is also where more friction starts to get introduced, because suddenly the system rears its ugly head and tries to co-opt it. If you were to regularly bring in $50k, suddenly the university wants more than half of it and it dawns on you that you don't quite need the university as much as they need you.
The extreme is a Jack Horner type who would eschew academia (but oh, the creative control he has!), but the thing I like about the size that we are right now is that we're flying under the radar of the tier-1 schools, and we're just funding and seeing lots of cool stuff. I'll happily duel university administrators in the future, but for now we get to focus on small pockets of really impactful science.
For the record, you can prevent the university carrying off half of the grant by stating as an official policy that you only pay X% overhead, where X is some much more reasonable number like 15.
Many private companies do this, and as long as it's something that's stated clearly and publicly, grants offices often go along.
By the way the number you want is 860 projects launched. The 5,615 figure is people who've started working on a project but haven't launched. So closer to ~42% success rate.