Two of the team members already spend a significant portion of their day job investigating and evaluating meta groups (Luke and myself). For Luke this is about 50% of his time for his own philanthropy and I spend maybe 10-20% of my time depending on what other projects I have on the go. In general, a core criterion for choosing us for the team was (I believe) that we all spend quite a bit of our non-day job thinking about or evaluating meta orgs. Matt and Denise have been very active, and strategic, donors in the space for many years and Tara whilst only making a switch to earning-to-give last year, thought very hard about this while she was on the other side of the table as COO and CEO of CEA. I also find her views on how to evaluate community efforts are particularly valuable. We all come across a variety of opportunities from our existing activities and expect anything we miss to come our way once we open up public applications (coming soon).
Re time spent discussing: we are trying to minimise the amount of time we spend on group calls, probably only 3-6 a year as they are generally less efficient than a-synchronous communication. We have internal email threads and a private forum that we are using for collaborating on research and swapping arguments / opinions.
Roughly, our process is that someone from the team looks into a funding opportunity, they then put it to the rest of the team in an email thread or in the forum with their research / arguments and the rest of the team then reply with their comments, questions, opinions. Then, ahead of a granting period, we come together to discuss the various proposals and over the next week or two each decide in a Google Sheet how we would want to split the available funds. There is a simple algorithm that averages and rounds, obeys our general rules for grant minimums etc., and we discuss / negotiate each other’s decisions and change our allocations until we all agree the outcome looks like a) a sensible outcome and b) represents the group’s views.
During the calls we have someone taking minutes and the offline discussions are all in text form, someone takes the initial proposals, minutes and offline discussion texts and turns those into write-ups. We each then give a round or two of feedback on the write-ups before submitting the decision and writeups to CEA for execution.
Exactly how much time this takes up for each of us is currently unclear as we all seem to be thinking about and replying to threads both inside and outside our day jobs.
Two of the team members already spend a significant portion of their day job investigating and evaluating meta groups (Luke and myself). For Luke this is about 50% of his time for his own philanthropy and I spend maybe 10-20% of my time depending on what other projects I have on the go. In general, a core criterion for choosing us for the team was (I believe) that we all spend quite a bit of our non-day job thinking about or evaluating meta orgs. Matt and Denise have been very active, and strategic, donors in the space for many years and Tara whilst only making a switch to earning-to-give last year, thought very hard about this while she was on the other side of the table as COO and CEO of CEA. I also find her views on how to evaluate community efforts are particularly valuable. We all come across a variety of opportunities from our existing activities and expect anything we miss to come our way once we open up public applications (coming soon).
Re time spent discussing: we are trying to minimise the amount of time we spend on group calls, probably only 3-6 a year as they are generally less efficient than a-synchronous communication. We have internal email threads and a private forum that we are using for collaborating on research and swapping arguments / opinions.
Roughly, our process is that someone from the team looks into a funding opportunity, they then put it to the rest of the team in an email thread or in the forum with their research / arguments and the rest of the team then reply with their comments, questions, opinions. Then, ahead of a granting period, we come together to discuss the various proposals and over the next week or two each decide in a Google Sheet how we would want to split the available funds. There is a simple algorithm that averages and rounds, obeys our general rules for grant minimums etc., and we discuss / negotiate each other’s decisions and change our allocations until we all agree the outcome looks like a) a sensible outcome and b) represents the group’s views.
During the calls we have someone taking minutes and the offline discussions are all in text form, someone takes the initial proposals, minutes and offline discussion texts and turns those into write-ups. We each then give a round or two of feedback on the write-ups before submitting the decision and writeups to CEA for execution.
Exactly how much time this takes up for each of us is currently unclear as we all seem to be thinking about and replying to threads both inside and outside our day jobs.