Frequently Asked Questions

What's wrong with research funding?

We think research currently does not yet realize its full potential with regard to contributing to the advancement of society, technology and culture. In particular, research should be more driven by stakeholder interests; it should solve clearly defined problems with effective resource investments; research results should be communicated better and be more accessible; interfaces and interdependencies between research should be made more transparent. The currently established peer-review based mechanisms alone are not sufficient in order to reach these goals.

Why is Participatory Research different?

The ParticipatoryResearch concept is based on the idea of creating an open, predictive market for research ideas. Communities of stakeholders, be it companies, societal groups or other researchers, bet (or vote) on the usefulness of prospective research results for their purposes. The most promising research ideas (according to stakeholder vote) will get funded. The market will be realised as a Web platform employing semantic and social networking strategies for collaboration and communication.

What's the idea behind a predictive market?

Economists found out that predictive markets are the best known institutions for information aggregation, since according to the Hayek hypothesis, the competition on the market most efficiently aggregates the asymetrically distributed information. On a predictive market participants bet on certain events. In the case of the ParticipatoryResearch concept stakeholders bet on the usefulness of the outcomes of research for their purposes. Such a prediction market is very efficient, since the bets of participants are calibrated by attaching a (virtual money) value to each bet and the overall market will very accurately reflect the mean predictions of all participants. Predictive markets proved to be that efficient that they are even considered to qualify as a tool for general governance of society (cf. Robin Hanson's Futarchy concept, Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?).

How are stakeholders different from peers?

Peers usually have the same background knowledge, intentions and perception with regard to certain research results. Peer review systems even aim at increasing this matching of competences. They are perfect to ensure excellence and quality. For deciding about what research should be funded excellence and quality, however, should be only a secondary criteria. More important is that a research task solves a real problem and (in order to maximise effectiveness) that the most pressing problems are solved first. The distinction between stakeholders and peers on the ParticipatoryResearch platform is made explicitly and implicitly: Funding agencies explicitly award a certain budget to members of a certain stakeholder community (e.g. SMEs, aerospace researchers or NGOs fighting climate change). Implicitly, members of these communities will utilize the awarded budget in ways, which benefit them most.

Since the concept specifically aims to support smaller grants, doesn't that create disproportional administrative overheads?

The core idea of Cofundos is that it is self-organizing/administrating as much as possible – everything from proposal/idea evaluation to results review should be performed directly by the community and on the Web platform. Of course there will be still some financial administration, but even that appears to get increasingly automatized.

Is licensing of the ideas and solutions under an open license an requirement?

Open-licensing of the results is not a direct requirement, but we think research that is ultimately funded by tax payers should benefit groups as large as possible and not only individual actors. Of course more sophisticated and project specific means for IPR clearance could be added at a later stage.

Wouldn't be a platform as Cofundos susceptible to collusion attacks?

This is an important issue, but resolvable but adding certain constraints. For example, we can require projects to be voted/pledged for by at least three different stakeholders and let people confirm an absent of conflict of interest. Also, the transparency of all information on the platform would prevent misuse, since everybody can see who was voting/pledging for what. Once people know that everything they do is publicly visible they are very careful to stick to the rules.

How is prevented that funding agencies pay twice for the same thing?

This problem might exist now, but will increasingly disappear on a platform such as Cofundos, since everything is really public and available for commenting, discussions or even reporting by peers in case of fraud attempts. First experiences on Cofundos showed that duplicate efforts (or solutions based on existing work) are quickly identified by community members.

Is the concept also applicable for basic and foundational research?

Stakeholders are not restricted to be companies or people and organisations outside research. ParticipatoryResearch is applicable to all scenarios, where users or groups interested in a solution for a certain problem already exist. It will not be applicable to research for which stakeholders will only appear in future. In that case, however, it is at least questionable whether this research should not be postponed till somebody (other than the researcher himself) feels that there is a problem to be solved.

Research is sometimes unpredictable. Aren't researchers who fail with risky and challenging problems endangered of loosing reputation?

Not at all. The question is, how they explain their failing to the stakeholders. If a large group of stakeholders is interested in a solution to a certain problem, it is a very important accomplishment when somebody can finally show and explain why this problem is not solvable.

When will the Participatory Research concept be reality?

Although the basic principles are ready to be tried out there is some work to do with regard to further refining the concept and consider privacy, security/safety and provenance aspects, further developing the Web platform for organising this market and the participatory research process, and last but no least persuade research funding agencies to use this platform for managing a part of their research portfolio. In order to achieve these goals the ParticipatoryResearch initiative needs your support.