Funding for Dataset Creation Projects

Tips for long-term sustainability

Like all projects, the financial and human resources required to collect and create training data in low-resourced contexts can be substantial. Securing sustainable resourcing is important for the long-term accessibility and sustainability of training datasets. Resources may cover the cost of updating and maintaining datasets, organizing competitions, facilitating community engagement and advocacy, covering travel expenses for meetings or conferences, and other operational costs.

The following strategies can help you find financial and in-kind resources to sustain your training datasets and keep them relevant and viable in the long term:

1. Grants: Securing funding through grants specifically aimed at covering the costs of updating the datasets, use-case development and incentives for contributors. This includes grants from governmental bodies, international organizations, educational institutions, and private foundations.
2. Building Partnerships: Establishing partnerships with academic institutions, non-profits, and other organizations that would benefit from the datasets can create collaborations that provide additional expertise and contributions to the expansion and maintenance of datasets.
3. Community Involvement in Fundraising: This can include crowdfunding campaigns where the community of researchers and beneficiaries directly contributes to the project’s financial resources.