Good Afternoon!
I'm writing to announce the Community Commons Colloquia for Friday October 11th, Noon-1:30pm.
Please distribute this announcement and Flyer to your colleagues, coworkers, departmental listservs, friends, family, and anyone else you think might be interested in learning about the concept of the commons
and how academic scholarship, community practice, and social engagement can combine to create both social arrangements and resource-pools with the power to sustain real communities, when faced with failures of the market and the state.
Community Commons Colloquia
Professor Johan Bollen (IUB Informatics)
"Collective Allocation of Science Funding: A Common Pool Research Resource?"
Date: Friday, November 8th, 2013
Location: The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, 513 N. Park
Avenue
Collective Allocation
of Science Funding:
Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens
of billions of dollars in annual science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible to best promote scientific innovation and productivity? The present system relies primarily on peer review of project proposals. In 2010 alone, NSF
convened more than 15,000 scientists to review 55,542 proposals. Although considered the scientific gold standard, peer review requires significant overhead costs, and may be subject to biases, inconsistencies, and oversights. We investigate a class of funding
models in which all participants receive an equal portion of yearly funding, but are then required to anonymously donate a fraction of their funding to peers. The funding thus flows from one participant to the next, each acting as if he or she were a funding
agency themselves. Here we show through a simulation conducted over large-scale citation data (37M articles, 770M citations) that such a distributed system for science may yield funding patterns similar to existing NIH and NSF distributions, but may do so
at much lower overhead while exhibiting a range of other desirable features. Self-correcting mechanisms in scientific peer evaluation can yield an efficient and fair distribution of funding. The proposed model can be applied in many situations in which top-down
or bottom-up allocation of public resources is either impractical or undesirable, e.g. public investments, distribution chains, and shared resource management.
Johan Bollen is
associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department
of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije
Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75
articles on computational social science, social media analytics, informetrics, and digital libraries. His research has
been funded by the NSF, IARPA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johan lives in Bloomington,
Indiana with his wife and daughter. In his free time he enjoys P90x and DJing in the local Bloomington clubs as DJ
Angst (with his colleague E-trash aka Luis Rocha).
This session will NOT be followed Potluck at The
Banneker Center , as we have encountered a scheduling conflict.