You are cordially invited to the traditional Network Institute end-of-the-academic-year event:

*** Tuesday July 3^rd, 15.00 hrs, Tuinzaal (W&N) *** 

Like every year, we have an interesting program for you:

• Tijs van den Broek (Organization science; short bio see below) will present his research on collective action via online communities: Community and Coordination: A Multi-level Analysis of Social Movement Team Diversity and Fundraising Effectiveness
• This year’s Academy Assistants will pitch their projects with a poster, accompanied by drinks and bites
• The winners of next year’s NI Academy Assistant funding will be announced

In addition, we will use the event to run a live pilot of a radically democratic form of grassroot funding.
As you may know, funding organizations such as NWO increasingly acknowledge (e.g., here) that concentrating large grants with few high-profile researchers has made it excessively hard for the majority of researchers to acquire (seed) funding to pursue new ideas or collaborations. Forms of grassroot funding may be a start of a solution for this problem.
Our own grassroot funding pilot will work as follows:

• each attending NI member will receive, upon arrival, a 100€ research voucher
• the voucher can be exchanged for actual funding only if bundled with other attendants’ vouchers.
  • E.g., two researchers could bundle vouchers to buy a 200€ software license, five researchers could bundle to pay for +/- 500€ online study participants, or ten researchers could bundle to jointly organize a 1000€ workshop.
• bundles require involvement of members from at least two faculties
• there will be an opportunity for ultrashort (30 sec) public pitches of research ideas during the event
• bundling decisions are taken during the event (before 17.30 hrs)

Off course we expect this pilot to result in a lively exchange of ideas during the meeting; it will be highly interesting to see how the available funding is going to be distributed, and whether this results in new research collaborations.

We hope to see you all there!

Best, Ivar Vermeulen

also on behalf of Marco Otte, Christine Moser, Victor de Boer, Antske Fokkens, Michel Klein, Mojca Lovrencak, Melanie Jong Tjien Fa, Frank van Harmelen, and Hans Akkermans

Short bio Tijs van den Broek

Tijs van den Broek is an assistant professor at the Organization Sciences department of the VU Amsterdam. His research focuses on the mechanisms, boundary conditions and outcomes of large-scale digital collective action, such as protests, advocacy campaigns and social entrepreneurship. Tijs employs an engaged scholarship, interdisciplinary and multimethod approach, including methods such as (online) experiments, database analysis, text mining and social network analysis.