Cameron,
Your response to Anna's question is dead on. We have to move away from the concept of "trusted sources" that can be relied upon to be completely accurate without providing adequate proof. Providing links to all the raw data is absolutely key and lets us use information from undergraduates, postdocs and machines with minimal assumptions.

That's why I'm happy to see that Brent is asking students to take pictures of the precipitates. We can compare directly against the pictures in my lab. Students are not always clear about the definition of a solution - for example milky suspensions can be considered solutions by some but they are not for our purposes. Pictures clarify that nicely.

Now there is a limit to how much can be reported by students. For example, I can't easily get proof that the micropipette was used correctly or that another mistake in measurement happened or that the wrong compound was used. Pictures help a lot with this too - for example I had a student who claimed that a compound was not soluble - from the pic it was obvious that there were several hundred milligrams in the vial instead of 40. Here the mistake was a decimal point error.

But other mistakes won't be caught quickly. For example we had a bad batch of phenanthrene-9-carboxaldehyde. When we got around to taking NMRs of starting materials we had to remove a bunch of results from the data pool and start over. This is why redundancy is still important. If two identical experiments don't come out the same we know to investigate it.

Unfortunately our NSF proposal on Crowdsourcing chemistry was rejected but we'll try again. I think Google would be a logical place to seek funding, especially since we use their services whenever possible -GoogleDocs, Blogger, etc. But they need to be convinced that there is something behind the concept. We already have compounds that were active against the malarial parasite from our collaboration with Rajarshi Guha at Indiana U. and Phil Rosenthal at UCSF. With Brent, if he can show that his teaching lab can produce new science we can use that as a hard fact. Cameron your support is extremely appreciated also!

I think that the role of funding is to ramp up an existing infrastructure of people already committed to participating. If I got more money I could support more students, get more chemicals, equipment like automated reactors, etc. Testers could get more resources to do more samples, modelers like Rajarshi could also get more assistance, etc. But, like open source software, the open source science core motor relies on the participation (even if limited) of people who have already bought into the concept.

Lets please continue the discussion and brainstorm some additional ways of funding these activities!