Re: participation grants—I don’t know if I like the suggestion or not, but I want to point out that it’s significantly different from compensation on work tasks, in that paid work tasks are not the first stage of a hiring process. So orgs have control over who gets to do the work task to begin with. This probably reduces the number of people only doing it for that compensation, if not eliminating those entirely. With participation grants, this is IMO a problem you’ll encounter.
Agreed—I tried to account for this with weasel words like “most,” “good-faith,” and “presumptively.”
I know at least one of the prize contests this year offered participation prizes for good-faith submissions (e.g., GiveWell awarded 39 $500 participation prizes). I would be curious whether the judges felt there were a bunch of submissions that seemed engineered to just garner one of those prizes.
My hunch is the compensation-seeking problem is manageable if the grants are modest; it would be tricky for someone to figure out how to do enough to clear the good-faith/serious application bar while working quickly enough to make compensation-seeking an attractive approach. Presumably, there would be one participation grant per lifetime, unless the applicant was given specific encouragement to reapply on a prior round and reasonably addressed any suggestions given. Also, I wouldn’t be opposed to the grantmaker compensating for somewhat less than the value of the applicant’s time—both as a means of discouraging compensation-seeking, and because it’s not unreasonable for the would-be grantee to bear some of the costs of the joint product.
Re: participation grants—I don’t know if I like the suggestion or not, but I want to point out that it’s significantly different from compensation on work tasks, in that paid work tasks are not the first stage of a hiring process. So orgs have control over who gets to do the work task to begin with. This probably reduces the number of people only doing it for that compensation, if not eliminating those entirely. With participation grants, this is IMO a problem you’ll encounter.
Agreed—I tried to account for this with weasel words like “most,” “good-faith,” and “presumptively.”
I know at least one of the prize contests this year offered participation prizes for good-faith submissions (e.g., GiveWell awarded 39 $500 participation prizes). I would be curious whether the judges felt there were a bunch of submissions that seemed engineered to just garner one of those prizes.
My hunch is the compensation-seeking problem is manageable if the grants are modest; it would be tricky for someone to figure out how to do enough to clear the good-faith/serious application bar while working quickly enough to make compensation-seeking an attractive approach. Presumably, there would be one participation grant per lifetime, unless the applicant was given specific encouragement to reapply on a prior round and reasonably addressed any suggestions given. Also, I wouldn’t be opposed to the grantmaker compensating for somewhat less than the value of the applicant’s time—both as a means of discouraging compensation-seeking, and because it’s not unreasonable for the would-be grantee to bear some of the costs of the joint product.
Edit: typo, should be not UNreasonable