Suppose you were a funder wanting to design a system to fund science projects that were bottom up rather than top down. How would you do it?
I think you'd want to restrict it to non-faculty to start with, and have some sort of consensus-building rather than competitive approach. Like, maybe you could have an initial round where people proposed ideas, followed by a second round where people indicated who they'd be willing to work with and which aspects of their ideas they'd be willing to drop or modify in order to build consensus. Possibly you might need multiple rounds like this until you iterated on a solution that worked.
Would there by problematic hidden power dynamics in an approach like that? I guess so, there always are. But maybe still better than top down approach?
And is there any chance of finding a funder who would be willing to experiment with such an idea? Or any existing examples of experiments like that? Or more generally, examples of funders taking a non-competitive approach?
