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Funding V2 Product description #23

Open yattias opened 4 weeks ago

yattias commented 4 weeks ago

Placeholder for the V2 of the funding feature. Product details will be added by @joycesticks and @TylerDiorio

joycesticks commented 4 weeks ago

ResearchHub Funding Allocation Feature

Summary

ResearchHub is introducing a new feature to revolutionize the way scientific research is funded. By leveraging a crowdsourced funding model and the ResearchCoin (RSC) ecosystem, we aim to improve the efficiency, transparency, and impact of research funding allocation.

Background

The current research grant funding process suffers from several challenges, including bias, misaligned incentives, lack of transparency, and high administrative overhead. This results in suboptimal allocation of resources and hinders scientific progress.

Target Users

Goals and Objectives

Benefits and ROI

Feature Overview

The ResearchHub funding allocation feature consists of the following key components:

User Stories and Requirements

Funder’s Journey

Scientist’s Journey

Functional Requirements

Additional ideas:

UX flow:

  1. Funding tab - enter through hubs page, see summary stats for each hub’s funding. You can donate to any hub individually.
  2. Click into a Hub to see a homepage for the Hub (like current Hub page, but optimized for funding). Users can see the total $ committed in grants in that hub above the fold. Anyone can donate to any RFP - and let the user who created the RFP allocate it for you
  3. Click into a RFP to see the preregistrations that have been submitted
  4. Click into preregistrations if you want to see/comment/peer review/vote
  5. Allow RFP creators to fund preregistrations
  6. Allow author to issue NFTs to funders
  7. Incentivize author to share updates on the project
  8. Eventually results in a publication that can be cited
  9. authors receive RSC based on reward algorithm

dominikusbrian commented 1 week ago

I was just strolling around in the ResearchHub Github repo. Found this repository and just finished reading this product description. Would love to drop a dash of thought on this from the perspective of Target User ( both as Research Funders and Scientist Looking for funding. )

Several key points I want to highlight and discuss:

Provide tangible ROI for research funders

Streamline the funding application and allocation process

Real-time project updates: Funded projects provide regular updates on their progress, maintaining transparency and allowing funders to track their investments.

On Versioning

[Scientist Perspective]

First of all, as outlined in the Scientist Journey described above, the process for scientist began with submitting the ideation of the project. Strongly agree that the streamlining is very essential, though not easy. Prior to starting my own Research-focused startup, and since then calling myself ResearchPreneur, I have just left Academia few years earlier and spent a good year in corporate research facility. Within these two arguably TradSci environments the process of funding application and allocation are well-known to be complicated and time consuming. I was in the middle of grant application for roughly half-mil CNY (appox $70,000) funding for 1 yr project, which took the whole committee and corporate executive (which just a layer above our department) almost half year in itself reach budget finalizing stage and still not closed. I grew impatient, and decided I will be better of investing those time directly in DOING the research, instead of too much on convincing and dumbing down the explanation about it. Spent almost another 3-4 months catering to "Innovation Center" in my city (Shanghai) equivalent to the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, but with billions more of money to disburse, where I happen to know the director/dean personally, but he is slowed down and me perplexed by the institution bureaucracy and red-tape too. Therefore, leading me to turn into DePIN for the research infra and possibly DeSci for research funding.

In academia, the funding available are mostly limited and very competitive, while in the industry for most they already funding "laying on the floor" for us researchers to pick up. I will skip the academia part because I assume everyone reading this is familiar with the process. With the industry case, starting up a sizable research project could take anywhere between 2-3 quarters or more. Most devastating part of it is (1) trying to convince committee that may or may not understand the importance / feasibility of the research well enough, and (2) the need for documenting things in report format (that need to be "dumbed down" a notch ), and having to continuously present these reports in weekly and even several times a week (to different departments). Surely the intention are well and primarily focusing on accountability and traceability of progress, but the logistic to deliver such is overlooked and take serious toll in time to do the real thinking/experiment/quality brainstorming.

Enough with backstory and back to the feature. Hopefully with the upcoming features accoutability and provenance (tracking of origin, timeline, authenticity, versions ) could be somehow become built-in without the need of excessive double-down work like in the scenario I described above. There's also an interesting feature can be derived from how typically funding in TradSci trickle down after they are approved. In TradSci some of the younger or less-willing/less-capable professor (in terms of applying for funding) usually prefer to "piggyback" on existing or upcoming project that already have funding or will have one soon. Maybe the same could also apply for this case in ResearchHub, so when there's researcher already working on specific related topic they can join force down the road to claim part of the funding specifically for that task.

Regarding overall flow on how things goes, I imagine this can be achieved by several means. One approach is to adopt the GitHub-inspired concepts of add and commit, issue-tracking, and automated GitHub Action. In our case of Open DeSci Research Project, Scientist can simply copy their daily log (or part of it they felt ready to share) this is similar to the "git add", then after all the note/log for the day (or whatever time period) is all added, one do "git commit, git push" submitting the changes to the repository. Typically each scientist task will belong to some Research Task (equivalent of github issue) that in turn part of the larger research roadmap. Keep in mind that the research roadmap and research task, will continuously evolve as more information from the actual research is being posted into the system. To illustrate this, I attached a simple diagram that try to visualize the flow (not the most aesthetic drawing, but hopefully readable enough). The yellow lines in this diagram is a mimic of GitHub Actions (and automated cross-referencing), therefore allowing researcher to simply do and log their research once and the rest will find itself in the larger framework. This mechanism also are very convenient in terms of versioning, tracing, origin of ideas/action etc. This works the same way for single scientist or team of scientists. All in all, the spirit is indeed building sort of GitHub for real-world research. Though ideally this system need to be built from ground up (or embedded directly in ResearchHub) the technical barrier will be to high to start, so the most rational approach is to use GitHub or other ready-made infra (e.g. Radicle.xyz for open-source alternative).

When it comes to the Deliverables part, since everything is well documented in the Research Repository , scientist can simply string them together or do final editing (along with feedback from community and funders) before then "Releasing" the paper/post/deliverables to ResearchHub or out there to the world. Again following the analogy of software development, it would be easy to continuously update the paper version by version (like what now done in arXiv). Let's not discuss "Forking" the project, but that would be a great function that will accelerate the future of research. Imagine one could simply use the same data all available in the same repository, then went forward doing different analysis or adding extra subject to experiments, etc. That helps with the reproducibility too (to some extend).

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Following the storyline of scientist journey, at this point the way RSC is disbursed could be in a one-off scenario, or in stage-by-stage basis, Both to reduce risk to funders, but also to ensure scientist kept the delivery going (any delay whatsoever, which is normal and expected, will be accounted in the modification of overall research plan which is also public, so no issue there).

[Research Funders Perspective]

As Individual or Institution, Organization / DAO

On tangible ROI for funders, perhaps things can be modelled after Kickstarter or other Crowdfunding project. "Credit share" as described in the Product Description above where funder get "funding author" badge is one thing. Monetary is also possible based on "traffic earnings" obtained from the rewards/tips given by the community on the paper which can be divided between funders and authors (somehow). More importantly, I would say the best ROI is maybe early-access (alpha tester, beta rollout) for packaged research tools/module (if any), could also be as simple as tutorial video/ mini-class video too. Ultimately after limited time early access all those material will also be publicly available. But funders get VIP privilege to see and contribute early feedback to its development.

Related to this, funders will also gain maximum benefit, if the research fund could be funnelled for specific purpose, I will call it [outsourcing BUIDL], as shown in the illustration above. In my observations, many of the world-class research group or team always have a group of people that perform auxiliary service for them. For instance, many have their own in-house design illustrator and engineering maintenance, and so on. Align with that, this Git for research would be better off if researcher can focus on research and auxiliary but necessary task can be outsourced (and paid directly using RSC), [BUIDL Contributors] can then commit their contribution accordingly. Such a feature will increase the accountability of how funding is used and distributed ( for instance it can somehow bypass scientist asking for 2000 RSC and paying only 1000 RSC to contributor). This contributor role can go along way encompassing various forms of auxiliary work, making deliverable communication piece, integrating all the reference, and many more. Thus, saving research time for research, and at the same time empowering the whole community having interest in science (though not being scientist themselves, or maybe not yet).

At the end of the day Research Funders can build their portfolio and establish themselves as a figure in Scientific Patronage (which how originally science been made possible in/after Renaissance ). Their portfolio of research being funded, will also somehow serve as "expertise" they (individuals or institution) are building for themselves, either for general cause or for alignment with their interest. ResearchHub will then be the platform for them to track their Venture Research investment impact and portfolio.

Talking about Venture Research Investment in DeSci through crypto, ID Theory looks like an interesting entity to learn from, they recently (last few months) released a series of blueprint in ways that funding in DeSci space can be done, below is one of the blueprint sketch.

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