We are now three weeks into #SciFund Challenge projects going live on RocketHub. Where do we stand?
Astonishingly well! As of this morning, #SciFund projects have together raised $49,294. Incredible. And if you look at the figure above, you can see that contributions are rising steadily.
Note by Jai: Aditya is a #SciFund Challenge participant and he is pursuing his doctorate in cellular and developmental biology at SUNY Upstate Medical University. Check out his great #SciFund project: C-Cilia in Motion! You can find Aditya on Twitter at @nishantaditya.
For a lot of people their early exposure to “science” was through science fiction. This was a great thing for those of us who eventually became scientists because science fiction inspired us to think creatively, imagine fantastic things, “to boldly go where no man has gone before”… And to have bad grammar.
The vast majority of people, however, only ever got the distorted, dramatized, exaggerated view of science. This view, that ‘science = laboratories filled with glowing lights and colourful, bubbling solutions in complicated looking glassware‘, is very misleading to the general public. It doesn’t give a true account of what a scientist does or how science progresses. This is where initiatives like The #SciFund Challenge would be VERY useful. These initiatives will bring in real scientists with real experiments and will force them to explain their work to a broad audience. This sort of exercise in public communication will help fuel public interest in science and, more importantly, give them an insider’s perspective on the vocation of science.
One #SciFund Challenge participant has had a very good couple of days! Kristina Killgrove, who is behind the Ancient Roman DNA project, has gotten all sorts of media coverage (like at CNN and Forbes). Even better, she has blown right past her financial target of $6,000 in less than two weeks. She is now at $9,000 and rising fast! How did she do it? I talked with her yesterday to learn her crowdfunding strategies. This is what I learned.
There are two parts to Kristina’s success: success at crafting a compelling science message and success in promoting her project. Let’s deal with message-crafting first.
On Twitter, Mary Canady asked whether there are any blog posts on the relationship between the SciFund Challenge and Open Science. As I had already started drafting this post, I mentioned that there should be one up soon, and I reframed it a bit to match that perspective, pointing out in the meantime that a blog post on the relation between SciFund and Creative Commonsalready exists. With a bit of delay due to server problems, here we go now.
During my six years in grad school slaving over grants and statistics, I avoided starvation thanks to the lunch trucks hovering around West Philly. They sell everything from vegan chili to doner kebabs, rescuing hundreds from this predicament each day. I used to be puzzled at why there were TWO Mexican trucks competing side by side. Everyone seemed to know which one was better –you could tell from the lengths of the lines. Wouldn’t the other want to move off to some remote corner and claim its poor victims all to itself? In stark contrast to this was the strategy of the ever-elusive wandering cupcake truck – a beast that was seldom spotted, brightening up random corners on each day. Well, you couldn’t count on a cupcake for desert, but you could always count on the burritos.
Go to Facebook and fill out the “Create a New Account” section. You can change everything later, so feel free to be honest about your name and everything else and if you want to change the account to represent an organization later, you can. Once you’ve submitted that information, you’ll have to verify your identity by entering a code sent from Facebook to your email address or phone. Following the code verification, Facebook will walk you through how to set up your profile. You will definitely want a profile picture (which you can change later), but finding people you know is optional at this point, as is touring privacy settings. Either of these activities can be done later, once your account is set up. I’d recommend taking the privacy tour, though, because it’s only 4 short screens to look through and the first screen is especially useful- it shows you how to set viewing privileges for every post you will make.
And that’s it- you’re ready to go!
2. SEND US YOUR USERNAME
A. Computer view: click on your profile picture and your first name at the very top of the screen (the red box in the image below). Then read the address bar in your browser, which should say something like “facebook.com/username”. Please send us the “username” part of that address.
B. Mobile view: Your username is currently unavailable to view from a mobile device, so head on over to a computer.
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The two kinds of email that we send.
Announcements about upcoming events: mostly about our upcoming classes (sent out every 1-2 months).
SciFund Solutions: 1-minute communication tips for scientists (sent out every 1-2 weeks).