This in particular strikes me as understandable but very unfortunate. I’d strongly prefer a fund where happening to live near or otherwise know a grantmaker is not a key part of getting a grant.
I personally have never interacted directly with the grantees of about 6 of the 14 grants that I have written up, so it it not really about knowing the grantmakers in person. What does matter a lot are the second degree connections I have to those people (and that someone on the team had for the large majority of applications), as well as whether the grantees had participated in some of the public discussions we’ve had over the past years and demonstrated good judgement (e.g. EA Forum & LessWrong discussions).
I don’t think you should model the situation as relying on knowing a grantmaker in-person, but you should think that testimonials and referrals from people that the grantmakers trust matter a good amount. That trust can be built via a variety of indirect ways, some of which are about knowing them in person and having a trust relationship that has been built via personal contact, but a lot of the time that trust comes from the connecting person having made a variety of publicly visible good judgements.
As an example, one applicant came with a referral from Tyler Cowen. I have only interacted directly with Tyler once in an email chain around EA Global 2015, but he has written up a lot of valuable thoughts online and seems to have generally demonstrated broadly good judgement (including in the granting domain with his Emergent Ventures project). This made his endorsement factor positively into my assessment for that application. (Though because I don’t know Tyler that well, I wasn’t sure how easily he would give out referrals like this, which reduced the weight that referral had in my mind)
The word interact above is meant in a very broad way, which includes second degree social connections as well as online interactions and observing the grantee to have demonstrated good judgement in some public setting. In the absence of any of that, it’s often very hard to get a good sense of the competence of an applicant.
I personally have never interacted directly with the grantees of about 6 of the 14 grants that I have written up, so it it not really about knowing the grantmakers in person. What does matter a lot are the second degree connections I have to those people (and that someone on the team had for the large majority of applications), as well as whether the grantees had participated in some of the public discussions we’ve had over the past years and demonstrated good judgement (e.g. EA Forum & LessWrong discussions).
I don’t think you should model the situation as relying on knowing a grantmaker in-person, but you should think that testimonials and referrals from people that the grantmakers trust matter a good amount. That trust can be built via a variety of indirect ways, some of which are about knowing them in person and having a trust relationship that has been built via personal contact, but a lot of the time that trust comes from the connecting person having made a variety of publicly visible good judgements.
As an example, one applicant came with a referral from Tyler Cowen. I have only interacted directly with Tyler once in an email chain around EA Global 2015, but he has written up a lot of valuable thoughts online and seems to have generally demonstrated broadly good judgement (including in the granting domain with his Emergent Ventures project). This made his endorsement factor positively into my assessment for that application. (Though because I don’t know Tyler that well, I wasn’t sure how easily he would give out referrals like this, which reduced the weight that referral had in my mind)
The word interact above is meant in a very broad way, which includes second degree social connections as well as online interactions and observing the grantee to have demonstrated good judgement in some public setting. In the absence of any of that, it’s often very hard to get a good sense of the competence of an applicant.