This is really cool! I would love to see EA move away from official funds and more towards microregranting schemes like this. Do you think in the future there’s much chance of you either
Accepting small donations towards the end of doing something like this repeatedly or even as an ongoing process; and/or
In some formal way, recording the granting decisions of your microregranters and shifting influence towards those who by some measure do ‘better’?
Glad you like it! As you might guess, the community response to this first round will inform what we do with this in the future. If a lot of people and projects participate, then we’ll be a lot more excited to run further iterations and raise more funding for this kind of event; I think success with this round would encourage larger institutional donors to want to participate.
It currently seems unlikely that we could raise a sizable matching pool (or initial funding pool) from small donations; I think like $100k at a minimum for making this kind of thing worth running. If people want to send small donations, I’d encourage those to go directly to the projects we host!
re: ongoing process, the quadratic funding mechanism typically plays out across different rounds—though I have speculated about an ongoing version before.
We don’t have specific, formal plans to use the microregrantor decisions in this round for other purposes, but of course if we notice people leaving thoughtful comments and giving excellent donations in this round, we’ll take notice and consider them for future regranting and other opportunities!
Also, all the granting decisions here will be done in public, so I highly encourage other EA orgs to use the data generated for their own purposes (eg evaluating potential new grantmakers).
This is really cool! I would love to see EA move away from official funds and more towards microregranting schemes like this. Do you think in the future there’s much chance of you either
Accepting small donations towards the end of doing something like this repeatedly or even as an ongoing process; and/or
In some formal way, recording the granting decisions of your microregranters and shifting influence towards those who by some measure do ‘better’?
Glad you like it! As you might guess, the community response to this first round will inform what we do with this in the future. If a lot of people and projects participate, then we’ll be a lot more excited to run further iterations and raise more funding for this kind of event; I think success with this round would encourage larger institutional donors to want to participate.
It currently seems unlikely that we could raise a sizable matching pool (or initial funding pool) from small donations; I think like $100k at a minimum for making this kind of thing worth running. If people want to send small donations, I’d encourage those to go directly to the projects we host!
re: ongoing process, the quadratic funding mechanism typically plays out across different rounds—though I have speculated about an ongoing version before.
We don’t have specific, formal plans to use the microregrantor decisions in this round for other purposes, but of course if we notice people leaving thoughtful comments and giving excellent donations in this round, we’ll take notice and consider them for future regranting and other opportunities!
Also, all the granting decisions here will be done in public, so I highly encourage other EA orgs to use the data generated for their own purposes (eg evaluating potential new grantmakers).