This seems like a good point, and I was surprised this hadn’t been addressed much before. Digging through the forum archives, there are some relevant discussions from the past year:
A post by RandomEA suggesting an EA crowdfunding platform (Raemon in the comments suggests having a ‘common app’ for the various funders, which seems like a good idea)
benjamin-pence’s announcement of the EA Angel Group (current status unclear)
Brendon_Wong’s post on three ideas for improving EA funding: a ‘kickstarter’ for projects, a platform for distributed grantmakers to share expertise and grant opportunities, and improved centralized grantmaking. Lots of interesting discussion in the comments.
CEA’s EA Meta Fund grants post mentioned a $10K grant for Let’s Fund, an org that “helps people to discover and crowdfund breakthrough research, policy and advocacy projects” via performing “in-depth research into fledgling projects” and sharing their recommendations. So far, Let’s Fund has a couple of object-level posts about specific areas (improving scientific norms and doing climate change research), and is running a crowdfunding campaign for $75,000.
I found a few more discussions that seemed relevant, but not that many.* One reason this might not be very discussed is major donors are often pretty well plugged-into the community, so their social networks might do a good enough job of bringing valuable opportunities to their attention. (And that goes double for big grantmakers.) Still, it seems to me like a hub of useful centralized information could benefit everyone, if it can establish itself as a Schelling point and not as another competing standard. And improving information flow to small donors alone is obviously still valuable, though I’d worry a bit about duplicated work and low-quality analyses resulting from a norm of distributed vetting.
*It’s interesting that most of the relevant posts are from the past year. Maybe a result of the ‘talent-constrained’ discourse getting people interested in what value small donors can provide beyond more funding for big projects?
To provide more information on the status of the EA Angel Group, Benjamin Pence and I are working together on the EA Angel Group (and its parent project Altruism.vc). The EA Angel Group is operating, although it received a lower than expected number of referrals from angels within the group which has significantly reduced the benefit that the group currently provides to its members.
I anticipated this concern months ago and tried to resolve the issue, but was delayed by ~5 months in our attempt to discuss sharing grant proposals with EA Grants. I felt like sharing grant proposals would be more efficient than launching our own “competing” grant application. I think a common app with rolling submissions is a much more sensible idea than having many separate applications that all do not share the applications they receive with other funders. To my understanding EA Grants currently doesn’t have an opinion on whether sharing grant applications with other funders is a good idea or not, and it is unclear when they will develop an opinion on this topic.
One objection to sharing grant applications among funders is that a funder would fund all of the grant proposals they felt were good and classify all other grant proposals as not suitable to be funded. From the funder’s perspective, sharing the unfunded grant proposals would be bad since other organizations could subsequently fund them, and the funder classified those grant proposals as not worth funding. I personally disagree with this objection because the argument assumes that a funder has developed a grant evaluation process that can actually identify successful projects with a high degree of accuracy. Since the norm in the for-profit world involves large and successful venture capital firms with lots of experienced domain experts regularly passing on opportunities that later become multibillion-dollar companies, I find it unlikely that any EA funding organization will develop a grant evaluation process that is so good it justifies hiding some or all unfunded applications.
Around the time I became more concerned that application sharing with EA Grants would be indefinitely delayed, I began to think an EA Project Platform would be a really great way to share not only grant opportunities but also other project-related opportunities like volunteering opportunities with the community. After building a prototype and seeking feedback, much of it positive, one EA decided to try to unilaterally block our platform from launching for reasons like wanting a central organization like CEA to back such a platform rather than a newer team like Ben and I. I personally disagreed with their reasoning, since it does not appear like a major organization has indicated any substantial interest in launching such a platform in the near future, and the launch of such a platform does not preclude the possibility of CEA or some other organization having a key role in the platform in the future. Not wanting to upset this person I decided to pause work on the EA Project Platform.
Ben and I are currently evaluating whether or not we want to work on a common app for funders or defer that plan and launch our own separate grant application.
Since our project to improve the EA project space is itself an EA project, our project also has the same capacity and funding constraints as other EA projects. If anyone would like to collaborate with us or provide some funding, please let me know!
This seems like a good point, and I was surprised this hadn’t been addressed much before. Digging through the forum archives, there are some relevant discussions from the past year:
A post by RandomEA suggesting an EA crowdfunding platform (Raemon in the comments suggests having a ‘common app’ for the various funders, which seems like a good idea)
benjamin-pence’s announcement of the EA Angel Group (current status unclear)
Brendon_Wong’s post on three ideas for improving EA funding: a ‘kickstarter’ for projects, a platform for distributed grantmakers to share expertise and grant opportunities, and improved centralized grantmaking. Lots of interesting discussion in the comments.
CEA’s EA Meta Fund grants post mentioned a $10K grant for Let’s Fund, an org that “helps people to discover and crowdfund breakthrough research, policy and advocacy projects” via performing “in-depth research into fledgling projects” and sharing their recommendations. So far, Let’s Fund has a couple of object-level posts about specific areas (improving scientific norms and doing climate change research), and is running a crowdfunding campaign for $75,000.
I found a few more discussions that seemed relevant, but not that many.* One reason this might not be very discussed is major donors are often pretty well plugged-into the community, so their social networks might do a good enough job of bringing valuable opportunities to their attention. (And that goes double for big grantmakers.) Still, it seems to me like a hub of useful centralized information could benefit everyone, if it can establish itself as a Schelling point and not as another competing standard. And improving information flow to small donors alone is obviously still valuable, though I’d worry a bit about duplicated work and low-quality analyses resulting from a norm of distributed vetting.
*It’s interesting that most of the relevant posts are from the past year. Maybe a result of the ‘talent-constrained’ discourse getting people interested in what value small donors can provide beyond more funding for big projects?
To provide more information on the status of the EA Angel Group, Benjamin Pence and I are working together on the EA Angel Group (and its parent project Altruism.vc). The EA Angel Group is operating, although it received a lower than expected number of referrals from angels within the group which has significantly reduced the benefit that the group currently provides to its members.
I anticipated this concern months ago and tried to resolve the issue, but was delayed by ~5 months in our attempt to discuss sharing grant proposals with EA Grants. I felt like sharing grant proposals would be more efficient than launching our own “competing” grant application. I think a common app with rolling submissions is a much more sensible idea than having many separate applications that all do not share the applications they receive with other funders. To my understanding EA Grants currently doesn’t have an opinion on whether sharing grant applications with other funders is a good idea or not, and it is unclear when they will develop an opinion on this topic.
One objection to sharing grant applications among funders is that a funder would fund all of the grant proposals they felt were good and classify all other grant proposals as not suitable to be funded. From the funder’s perspective, sharing the unfunded grant proposals would be bad since other organizations could subsequently fund them, and the funder classified those grant proposals as not worth funding. I personally disagree with this objection because the argument assumes that a funder has developed a grant evaluation process that can actually identify successful projects with a high degree of accuracy. Since the norm in the for-profit world involves large and successful venture capital firms with lots of experienced domain experts regularly passing on opportunities that later become multibillion-dollar companies, I find it unlikely that any EA funding organization will develop a grant evaluation process that is so good it justifies hiding some or all unfunded applications.
Around the time I became more concerned that application sharing with EA Grants would be indefinitely delayed, I began to think an EA Project Platform would be a really great way to share not only grant opportunities but also other project-related opportunities like volunteering opportunities with the community. After building a prototype and seeking feedback, much of it positive, one EA decided to try to unilaterally block our platform from launching for reasons like wanting a central organization like CEA to back such a platform rather than a newer team like Ben and I. I personally disagreed with their reasoning, since it does not appear like a major organization has indicated any substantial interest in launching such a platform in the near future, and the launch of such a platform does not preclude the possibility of CEA or some other organization having a key role in the platform in the future. Not wanting to upset this person I decided to pause work on the EA Project Platform.
Ben and I are currently evaluating whether or not we want to work on a common app for funders or defer that plan and launch our own separate grant application.
Since our project to improve the EA project space is itself an EA project, our project also has the same capacity and funding constraints as other EA projects. If anyone would like to collaborate with us or provide some funding, please let me know!