Informatics professor André van der Hoek and postdoctoral scholar Thomas LaToza propose to use the four-year National Science Foundation grant to conduct research into whether crowdprogramming can be achieved and, if so, in what form, under what conditions, and with what benefits and drawbacks.
As part of the grant work, the UC Irvine team plans to create a publicly available platform for crowdfunding called CrowdCode, a tool set designed to address the intricacies of crowd programming.
It remains to be seen how and if crowdfunding differs fundamentally from open source software, which relies on a corps of volunteer to improve code. That’s freely available to the public.