Gates Submission on ONS, crowdsourcing and malaria

On Friday I submitted a proposal to the Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges Explorations:

Creative, unorthodox thinking is essential to overcoming the most persistent challenges in global health. The first vaccines were developed over 200 years ago because revolutionary thinkers dared to try an entirely new approach to preventing disease.

The power of innovation is at work in countless other fields, from space travel to the Internet: now is the time to harness that power to save lives and improve the health of millions of people in the developing world.

Grand Challenges Explorations will foster innovation in global health research and expand the pipeline of ideas that merit further exploration. The initiative will use an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants will be awarded multiple times per year at approximately $100,000 each. Additional funding of $1 million or more will be available for projects that show promise.

There is a 2 page limit so the proposal was painted in very broad strokes. Since Nature Precedings doesn't take proposals anymore, I just uploaded it to Noam Harel's SCIEnCE wiki. The core concept is leveraging crowdsourcing and Open Notebook Science to develop new anti-malarial agents. It is similar to the last NSF proposal I submitted, except that the purpose is squarely on drug development, which is not allowed for NSF funding.

I also broke it down into short sections and contributed it to the Thoughtmesh project just to see how that works.