Link to our crowdfunding platform:
Link to our symposium page:
Current Work:
Covid-19 Support Packages - Supporting students of TUM financially during these challenging times
The last months were a challenge for all of us, especially students who were not financially well-off. The Covid-19 pandemic continued to affect all of our lives.
This was why we, Team Freesearch, decided a few months ago to start working on a completely new challenge. We wanted to find and implement a way to help students of TUM who were financially impacted by the Covid-19 situation.
As our Crowdfunding Platform continued to mature for projects of TUM students, we worked on financial support packages consisting of 250€ each to help students impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The packages were to be funded by the TUM community (Professors, Alumni, Students, Employees) through donations using CrowdTUM - the crowdfunding platform we developed as part of our TUM: Junge Akademie scholarship program. (crowd.ja.tum.de). We felt this would be an honorable goal, for which CrowdTUM was almost predestined, as well as a high note to end our time in the TUM:JA. Additionally, we developed a two-step application process for students, which ensured that the financial aid went to the right students in need and was as fair as possible.
We closely worked with TUM and TUM management on all of this, whose positive reactions to our work encouraged us. The close cooperation was to ensure that our implementation of the relief packages and our other ideas were done in a legally and financially correct way, protecting the students' and the donors' personal data.
We will keep you updated with news here, as we neared the official launch of this initiative very soon. So check back regularly, and we and the students of TUM would be very happy if once we officially launched this initiative to help out students in need, you checked out CrowdTUM and considered donating.
The Freesearch Project:
Funding the Future
We believed that the future of funding fair, unbiased, and impactful research was through crowd funding. This hypothesis was based on the following reality:
- Funding by corporations resulted in bias towards the goals of the corporations.
- Funding by governments resulted in bias towards the goals of the current governing bodies.
We saw crowdfunding as a viable and strong source of income for future research, especially for research done by students and young scientists.
Goals
- Established a crowdfunding website & platform that was easy to use and effective at marketing projects.
- Found promising projects to sponsor through our platform.
- Analyzed the interest in funding, evaluated the outcome of our approach.
- Assisted the selected projects not only in their funding but also in their science communication through our website platform.
Here you could find our platform: www.crowd.ja.tum.de
TEAM
- Altan Birler
- Karlis Blums
- Alexander Karollus
- Jan Kochanowski
- Dominik Schindler
- Tobias Spöttl
- Stephanie Stockert
- Bruno Villela Pedras Lago
- Maximilian Wagner
Tutors
- Sarah Braun
- Panagiotis Christou
Supervisor
- Prof. Dr. Sonja Berensmeier
