Crowdsourcing site launched to help raise revenue for UC Berkeley

A crowdsourcing website has been launched to call on students, alumni, faculty and staff to pitch their ideas about how to raise revenue for University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

The university, seen as a world-class center for innovation, faces annual funding shortage of about 100 million U.S. dollars due to years of cuts to UC system funding by the state of California, and therefore has the website up and running as part of its New Revenue Initiatives.

The site, known as Ideaction, "is one of many strategies being pursued... to combat the deficit" and one of many new programs designed to shore up against that gap, said William Rohrer, a Berkeley alum and community engagement specialist with the Ideaction team.

"We help units find and develop new resources for revenue... and take things from idea to implementation."

Designed to lure people into Ideaction, where anyone in the campus community or the general public can sign up and submit revenue-generating concepts, the contest is seen as a rubric for future experimental funding programs, Rohrer said in a UC Berkeley news release earlier this week.

"The Berkeley community is very broad and loyal to campus, and we want their help to solve this big problem," he said. "They're engineers, doctors, community organizers, artists... They know their community better than we do, and we're looking for their ideas and feedback."

And there are prizes up for grabs in the inaugural contest.

As the site welcomes all ideas, from crazy half-baked to well-formed, proposals submitted so far include a campus food-truck day, a maker camp and a valet parking service for visitors who do not have access to campus parking.

The initiative is focused exclusively on new revenue streams, not cost-cutting ideas.

Rohrer said there would be a variety of campaigns to crowdsource, assess and develop ideas after the first contest, the date of which is yet to be announced. Endit