The Concept

The Process

The envisioned ParticipatoryResearch process roughly proceeds allong the following steps:

1. Researchers publish ideas for interesting research topics on the Participatory Research platform as early as possible.
2. Other researchers and stakeholders comment on the research ideas, add requirements and pledge a certain amount of a virtual research currency they would be willing to “pay” for a successful realization.
3. Researchers and stakeholders (such as SMEs, organizations of general welfare) are equipped by funding agencies with a budget for pledging, which cannot be used for projects with a conflict of interest.
4. Once a project idea received enough pledges the funding agency provides the funds for the project to be executed.
5. Project in progress: investigators report publicly (e.g. via a Weblog) on progress. This enable stakeholders to be contiguously involved, e.g. by suggesting changes in requirements or pointing out promising alternatives avenues for investigation that may appear.
6. Project finished: results are published on the platform, everybody is invited to comment on the success, but only the stakeholders (i.e. those who pledged) are eligible to vote about the success / to write an evaluation report.
7. Evaluation reports are publicly available and build track records of researchers.

Technical realization

We envision the technical realization of the ParticipatoryResearch platform to:

• encourage small effortless contributions (e.g. comments, polls) by using Web 2.0 techniques.
• syndicate all content published on the platform
• employ semantic technologies, such as tagging and folksonomies, vocabularies for the end-user driven structuring and annotation of ideas, projects, results and comments
• incorporate social networking elements, collaborate and discuss ideas and topics in groups and have a personalized views on a neighborhood of peer researchers and research topics

ToDos

Currently, Participatory Research is just a concept (although a first simplified version of the platform exists with Cofundos). In order to establish the concept successfully the following problems have to be solved:

• refine the concept into a comprehensive a prediction market model for research funding which considers privacy, security/safety and provenance aspects,
• implementing a Web platform for organising this market and the participatory research process,
• persuade research funding agencies to use this platform for managing (a part of) their research portfolio.