I would be in favour of this fund using ~5% of its money to pay for staff costs, including a permanent secretariat. The secretariat would probably decrease pressure on grantmakers a little, and improve grant/feedback quality a little, which makes the costs seem worth it. (I know you’ve already considered this and I want to encourage it!)
I imagine the secretariat would:
-Handle the admin of opening and advertising a funding round
-Respond to many questions on the Forum, Facebook, and by email, and direct more difficult questions to the correct person
-Coordinate the writing of Forum posts like this
-Take notes on what additional information grantmakers would like from applicants, contact applicants with follow-up questions, and suggest iterations of the application form
-(potentially) Manage handover to new grantmakers when current members step down
-(potentially) Sift through applications and remove those which are obviously inappropriate for the Long Term Future Fund
-(potentially) Provide a couple of lines of fairly generic but private feedback for applicants
This strikes me as a great, concrete suggestion. As I tell a lot of people, great suggestions in EA only go somewhere if someone is done with them. I would strongly encourage you to develop this suggestion into its own article on the EA Forum about how the EA Funds can be improved. Please let me know if you are interested in doing so, and I can help out. If you don’t think you’ll have time to develop this suggestion, please let me know, as I would be interested in doing that myself if you don’t have the time.
I would be in favour of this fund using ~5% of its money to pay for staff costs, including a permanent secretariat. The secretariat would probably decrease pressure on grantmakers a little, and improve grant/feedback quality a little, which makes the costs seem worth it. (I know you’ve already considered this and I want to encourage it!)
I imagine the secretariat would:
-Handle the admin of opening and advertising a funding round
-Respond to many questions on the Forum, Facebook, and by email, and direct more difficult questions to the correct person
-Coordinate the writing of Forum posts like this
-Take notes on what additional information grantmakers would like from applicants, contact applicants with follow-up questions, and suggest iterations of the application form
-(potentially) Manage handover to new grantmakers when current members step down
-(potentially) Sift through applications and remove those which are obviously inappropriate for the Long Term Future Fund
-(potentially) Provide a couple of lines of fairly generic but private feedback for applicants
This strikes me as a great, concrete suggestion. As I tell a lot of people, great suggestions in EA only go somewhere if someone is done with them. I would strongly encourage you to develop this suggestion into its own article on the EA Forum about how the EA Funds can be improved. Please let me know if you are interested in doing so, and I can help out. If you don’t think you’ll have time to develop this suggestion, please let me know, as I would be interested in doing that myself if you don’t have the time.