[Board] Fw: [okfn-discuss] Open Participatory Research

[jo at frot.org]

dear all,

I consider this an effort to watch, as well as something that OSGeo
user organisations could get involved in. A "prediction market" for
open source and data development between research funding
organisations, partly with a "pledgebank" nature. 

As is apparent at http://wiki.cofundos.org/Concept it is early days. 
In future, say a network like CASCADOSS or Humboldt could direct a
fraction of their funds through Cofundos to "get things done".
It could clash with an open source consultancy model, OTOH it could
enable consultancies to pick up bits of work and business network 
connections where they couldn't manage the process overhead to pick up
whole projects. And to open up the edges of academia to small orgs.

Rufus Pollock has a paper ongoing treating the "information economics"
of such a model, how it affords collaborative filtering of research
quality, and how it connects to "open access".
http://www.rufuspollock.org/2008/07/16/dissemination-of-scholarly-information/

(Sören Auer is responsible for dbpedia.org, the structured data
rendering of wikipedia.) 
----- Forwarded message from Sören Auer <auer at informatik.uni-leipzig.de> -----

Hi all,

A while ago I was already reporting here about our Cofundos.org project 
for managing end-user driven open-source software development. Our 
ultimate aim, however, is to explore new ways of open, stakeholder 
driven research funding and Cofundos is just an initial step into this 
direction.

In the last weeks I was talking with several people involved in science 
funding and they seemed to be pretty interested in the idea of creating 
an *prediction market [1] for research ideas* in order to identify the 
most promising approaches.

In order to advance this project, attract supporters and thus finally 
convince decision makers in research funding an politics we have set up 
a web site at:

<http://wiki.cofundos.org>

I would be very happy to receive your comments and of course support 
statements at [2]. I'm especially interested in views from different 
disciplines (e.g. Chemistry, Biology, Social Sciences etc.), since the 
Participatory Research concept is currently pretty much influenced by 
our Computer Science perspective.

Sören


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
[2] http://wiki.cofundos.org/Supporters

-- 

--------------------------------------------------------------
Sören Auer, AKSW/Computer Science Dept., University of Leipzig
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer,  Skype: soerenauer