Community Capitalism for Crowdfunded Medical Research

Here we bring more specific form to a particular Community Capitalism implementation using electronic funds and contractual agreements to crowdfund medical research.

Roles

Constituents in the process of medical research crowdfunding include the following roles:

• Reward Bringers. Employers, in a way. Payers, who want certain results. Questioners, I will call them.
  • In medical research the rewards are brought by those who have urgent questions, the Questioners. Questioners contribute funding to research on their particular questions.

  • A Design Utility Validator is a Questioner has chosen to pre-commit and pre-release their pledged funds based on the adequacy of the research design itself for answering their question, or who propose reasons why their question would not be answered by the result.

• Reward Takers. Receivers. Employees. There are a lot of roles here, and everyone needs to get paid. Some of the following roles may be taken by single individuals.
  • Investors, who take a piece of the pie for special (first, last) financial contributions. Visionaries can make bank by investing in questions that have high value. A percentage of each project's cost goes back to the investors who first believed in it and started the fundraising rolling, and who put in the last dollar when everyone else was playing Chicken, waiting for someone else to pay first.

  • Question Designers who raise questions that people might care about.

  • Agglomerators of the questions into definable research projects.

  • Research Project Designers.

  • Researchers, who conduct the experiments/collect the data.

  • Subjects of the experiments, human or not

  • Providers of any material or services required in the research.

  • Statisticians, who determine the statistical methods that are appropriate to the data and question.

  • Analysts, who analyse the data and apply suitable statistical methods to it.

  • Authors, who write up the results.

  • Reviewers, who approve the validity of the reasoning from data to answer of question.

  • Editors who interact with the Authors to make the results accessible

  • Independent quality control Adjudicators who assess the adequacy of the quality of work of the various employees. Trusted. Practical. Wise.

  • Don't forget, Accountants, Managers, Lawyers, to perform their respective roles, as necessary, but not more.

Requirementss

Imagine now a tight yet flexible contracting system in which the contribution of funds on the front end is carried out subject to a contract -- a many-party contract, or a set of linked contracts, that ensures on the back end that contributed funds actually receive their expected value. "Tight" in that the system is required to deliver an acceptable result before the funds are delivered. "Flexible" in that only the roles required for the particular research project are used while unneeded roles are not.

The contract set must include obligations of the many constituents to competently perform their appropriate roles, such that the demands of the original contributors of the funding are actually met through the joint completion of all the different roles to produce the research output bearing on the question asked.

• Let there be a community capitalism website with an associated tree-structured project set and three-tiered bank account tree.

• Let the tiers be: pledged. committed. released.

• Let each project in the tree have its associated three-tiered account. Each account entry should include its contributor, amount, project, and tier.

• Let the tree building/managing/display/editing system enable each role to self-identify, engage in contracted roles including funds contribution as well as performance of work roles.

• Let there be a multi-phase operation of contract engagement accessible to potential participants including application/bid, comparison, offer, acceptance.

• Let there be a phased budgeting system for each project with budgets for one or more levels of specificity in project specification & design & budgeting, project implementation.

• Let there be a system for adjudicating between competing participants in which lowest price bid is not the only criterion but also capability/reputation within their area of competence also plays a part in selecting participants from applicants.

• Let there be a contributions-to-action function that determines, based on pledges, commitments and budgets, what level of action can be engaged or triggered.

• Let there be a followup communications and funds-commitment process in which pledge money becomes committed when questioners see the research proposal & design.

• Let there be an implementation of the Community Capitalism vision of funds being released after not just milestone achievement but recipient approval, in a structured process preventing obstruction.

• Finally, please release early release often, where possible. There will be less before there is more, hopefully incrementalism is possible where a part of this vision may be implemented to achieve some practical utility and to drive the rest; thus, a prioritization and dependency graph of all these parts.

Given such structure one may hope that reward bringers will fund designed questions for competent researchers to answer definitively. This will then occur outside the requirements of Big Pharma and the NIH, and thus that our urgent, life-saving questions may be answered sooner and better than otherwise possible.

Software Components

• Website

• Database

• Constituent/User signup, signin, dashboard.

• UI to add to the system. Add a question, define an experiment or submit added project structure, engage a constituent to a role.

• Contracts for each role. Enforceable contract signature records or execution history.

• Money handling infrastructure. Receive, Send, Label. Pledge, Commit, Release. Could be ethereum with smart contracts, could be another, or a new, cryptocurrency, or a suitable bank with an API.

• Demand/response structured progress reporting for each role.

• Workflow ruleset: what progress triggers what next demand.

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