For example, David and Jason’s report on charter cities was completed in 100 hours, a reasonable fraction of which was extra legwork for external writeup/following up with affected parties, after the original report was delivered to Open Phil. My impression is that the bulk of the work was done on a fairly short calendar time cycle too, in ways that may be hard for external parties to replicate. But naively the report would still be useful to Open Phil and cost-effective to fund if it took 200 hours to complete and 3x the calendar time.
Just to clarify, the 100 hours was actually just for the original report and doesn’t include any of the extra leg work for the public version, because I forgot to update that time taken estimate in the public version. The extra work for the public version was an additional 10-15 hours of work from the two of us, but there was also work from others reviewing the report. This extra work took place over 5 weeks of calendar time.
Just to clarify, the 100 hours was actually just for the original report and doesn’t include any of the extra leg work for the public version, because I forgot to update that time taken estimate in the public version. The extra work for the public version was an additional 10-15 hours of work from the two of us, but there was also work from others reviewing the report. This extra work took place over 5 weeks of calendar time.
Thanks for the clarification!