Happy to see you here @cindys ! Sorry for the late reply as I was travelling and conferencing abroad.
People in the biohacker community have criticized the DITOs project for not being very participatory towards the community. Mainly involving them through asking for free work or using their work without proper attribution. A big discussion around fair pay / fair play ensued and continued at the Global Community Bio Summit last week.
Among other things, this seems to be tied to the bureaucratic nature of partners participating in large publicly funded projects. Money is going into managing and reporting on projects, rather than doing actual high impact work. Not sure if this is the case for DITOs, but surely you’ve experienced it at some point.
I do a lot of work around science, citizen engagement and education at a grassroots level. We do cool stuff and involve loads of people without any budget. A big contrast to certain several hundred thousand euro projects of which the output is meager in terms of quality and citizen involvement, as well as being dead in the water when funding ends. Browsing through past EU project websites often feels like walking through a graveyard, “Fun while it lasted” on the tombstones. On to the next funding round.
Speaking to other community labs all over the world last week at the Bio Summit, I have the impression it is seeping into their organisations as well. I hear the old, establish labs talk about their ‘executive directors’ and other roles that deal with (or add?) overhead and generally lower the cool stuff:cost ratio. Unavoidable when you grow in size, but definitely to be improved upon.
Now that we are going through a growth phase with our own organisations, we absolutely want to maintain our cost efficiency. And importantly, fairly pay the people doing the actual work firstly. I’d like to explore: how do we ensure this through organisation infrastructures?
It further ties into other discussions we are having at the Festival, such as our panel The Edge of Funding.