This ParticipatoryResearch initiative launched by AKSW aims at developing and promoting the concept of stakeholder-driven research. Goals are to (1) develop a prediction market model for research funding, (2) implement a Web platform for organising this market and the participatory research process, (3) persuade research funding agencies to use this platform for managing a part of their research portfolio.

A first step towards this goal was made with Cofundos.org – a market for open-source software R&D. The Web site of the ParticipatoryResearch initiative is hosted at: http://wiki.Cofundos.org.

This years edition of the renowned German OpenSourceJahrbuch contains an overview article about Cofundos (in German).

The Semantic Web School just published an interview with Cofundos founder Sören Auer on Cofundos and the vision of participatory R&D. Read the interview here.

We released a kiosk modus for Cofundos today, which allows to embed the complete Cofundos.org functionality into your Web site.

This is realized by defining an HTML template which should be used for the kiosk and one (or multiple tags) of projects to be shown in the kiosk. The kiosk will be reachable via its own address (e.g. kioskname.cofundos.org). Once signed in, you can create a kiosk for your website at http://cofundos.org/kiosk.php.

The new Cofundos kiosk mode allows for example open-source projects to seamlessly integrate Cofundos functionality into their Web sites.

Michael Haschke (eye48.com) redesigned Cofundos.org. We hope the new Cofundos layout is clearer, better scalable and generally more consistent. It was developed according to the guidelines of W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. The new theme is completely based on CSS and is largely barrier-free. Let us know, if you have remarks or see room for tweaks.