The conversation last week about the Horizon2020 grants gave me a fair amount to think about.
I didn’t know how small the chances were for us to receive any of this money. The figure @Alberto quoted was around 3% that we’d get the grant, and 97% that we wouldn’t.
One of the things that i learned when studying exam techniques, was that if a question is only worth 3% of the overall marks for an exam, then you shouldn’t spend more than 3% of the total exam time on it.
So rather than dismissing it, as having no chance, or spending too much of our time on this, we should put 3% of our effort into working on this funding source, and use 97% of our time to try to look at other funding methods.
Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo are all interesting options, but there’s an established business model that has been in use for centuries.
Credit Unions, financial co-operatives.
They’re well establlished in the UK legal and financial frameworks, and there will be the equivalent in other EU countries. It also means that we wouldn’t need to do any new research, we just find the people with the appropriate skills/knowledge.
It also means that we wouldn’t have to rely on the whims of any external sponsors, because we’d be funding it ourselves.
I don’t disagree with you in theory, it’s just that EU applications take time and in fact the work going into them is above 3% imho and it’s not really a choice. If you want to decipher documentation and make sure all your partners are on board, it ends up more time consuming. Which is not a problem because then even if we don’t get it, we’ll be able to make the proposal public, so anyone can take it to another space.
If you’d be interested in looking for other funding streams it would be great, but you probably need more to help… do you have someone in mind?
I had emailed @Rémy a while ago, and @Ben is very familiar with the idea,… so the “we” you mention gets wider and is not depending on any one or two people who “should” do something now, but on many Edgeryders who could potentially be interested.
I’m privately funded by an Angel Investor from Scotland.
He likes my ideas, and he thinks that they’re workable.
It’s why i’m being a little more cautious than usual, but it’s also why i’m able to consider projects that would run on a larger scale than i’d normally work with.
I’ve never been involved with any EU-funding applications before, so i’ve been following this stuff with interest.
How long does this normally take? How many work days does it take to research and prepare one of these?
If you take that number of days as the 3% value, then should we not be taking an equivalent 97% time to try other things?
So I have about 35 hrs put into CAPS and Health Care for Hackers in the last two working months, so this would be 1 week out of 8, but this is just me (12% of my time) and so far, more work is to be done over March… the others have put it their own share, haven’t got an idea what it comes down to collectively.
Considering Edgeryders is made of many projects and people that welcome my/our attention and time, I don’t have the 88% rest of my time to put in looking for funding for this particular project One solution is that the “we” becomes other people here in the network who are interested in finding other applications for this idea and drive it… while keeping it open so everyone benefits of the outcomes, at least in terms of learning collectively. My two cents…
I wasm’t just talking about your time, @noemi, i was talking about all of our schedules, the whole Edgeryders community.
If you’ve put 35 hours+ into this funding application ( and from what i’ve seen, it needs at least 1 person doing this full-time to have any chance of succeeding), then we should take around 12 hours as 1%.
What about we all co-ordinate our efforts so that we can get the most effective results?
There are probably similar success rates for other funding applications. I don’t know where you’d find the data, but we could use those figures as benchmarks for scheduling our time.
The work that @Nadia has been creating on revenue streams, would be another method to achieve financial independence.
The work that @matthias has been doing with the OpenVillage Solutions, PayCoupons, and the work he’s personally been doing to convert his truck into a living space, is another approach to reducing our financial footprint.
The thing that i’m trying to do with making and manufacturing is another approach towards reducing our costs-of-living, which in turn will free up our time to work on the things we really enjoy.
One solution is that the “we” becomes other people here in the network who are interested in finding other applications for this idea and drive it… while keeping it open so everyone benefits of the outcomes, at least in terms of learning collectively. My two cents…