Another question I’m curious about: has a grantmaker from an EA-affiliated organisation you’ve been in touch with been open to the idea of sourcing ideas or incorporating applications coming in through Angel Group form? Or have they shared any worries or reservations you can share?
I think for example that a ‘just-another-universal-protocol’ worry would be very reasonable to have here. This is something I’m probably not helping with since I’m exploring an idea for a crowdfunding + feedback gathering platform for early-stage community entrepreneurs in the EA community to extend their runways (been recently in touch with Brendon on that).
To avoid that I think we need to do the hard work of reaching out to involved parties and have many conversations to incorporate their most important considerations and start mutually useful collaborations. I.e. consensus building.
John Maxwell wrote an analysis on your initial post on how most platform initiatives seem to fail in the EA community and that the ones that did last seemed resulted from a long stretch of consensus building (+ attentive refinement and execution in my opinion). This was useful for me to consider that more deeply as an issue in coordinating funding in the EA community. It at least led me to take smaller, tentative steps to trying things out while incorporating the advice/goals/perspectives/needs of people with deep understandings of aspects or a clear stake in using the final product.
John Maxwell brought up some interesting points. He suggests that platforms can experience the chicken and egg problem when it comes to getting started, and that intensive networking is a way to overcome this issue. I agree that platforms often have this problem, but the EA Angel Group resolved this not by networking intensely but instead by offering a lot of value to angels. This would incentivize them to join the platform even without a large number of existing grant applicants which would in turn incentivize grant applicants to apply.
Of course, we do need a stream of incoming grant applications to remain viable, and unfortunately we encountered some unexpected issues when attempting to collaborate with EA Grants and speak to many community members as part of several strategies to acquire grant applications. As mentioned in my progress update comment, I am currently pursuing alternate strategies to achieve this objective which involve steps that I have greater control over (and less steps that require the approval of entities whose decisions I cannot influence). That being said, I think networking and collaboration is highly valuable, and am scaling that up even as I pursue strategies that do not require networking to succeed.
I wrote a progress update comment regarding the EA Angel Group which covered our grant opportunity discovery activities over the last few months. We spoke with EA Grants several months ago, and to the best of my knowledge they are still determining whether to send and receive grant applications with other funders. At least one major funding group has expressed significant interest in sending and receiving grant applications with the EA Angel Group, and we are in the process of talking with various funders about this.
I mentioned the one concern I heard and my response to it in my progress update comment:
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.
Can you elaborate on:
I think for example that a ‘just-another-universal-protocol’ worry would be very reasonable to have here.
Are you suggesting that funders may be concerned about adopting a protocol which ends up providing limited value? As I’ve stated in several other comments, I think sharing grant applications can be of considerable value since arbitrarily limiting the pool of projects seems pretty suboptimal.
To avoid that I think we need to do the hard work of reaching out to involved parties and have many conversations to incorporate their most important considerations and start mutually useful collaborations. I.e. consensus building.
I agree. I did some initial outreach at first and will begin additional outreach shortly.
Another question I’m curious about: has a grantmaker from an EA-affiliated organisation you’ve been in touch with been open to the idea of sourcing ideas or incorporating applications coming in through Angel Group form? Or have they shared any worries or reservations you can share?
I think for example that a ‘just-another-universal-protocol’ worry would be very reasonable to have here. This is something I’m probably not helping with since I’m exploring an idea for a crowdfunding + feedback gathering platform for early-stage community entrepreneurs in the EA community to extend their runways (been recently in touch with Brendon on that).
To avoid that I think we need to do the hard work of reaching out to involved parties and have many conversations to incorporate their most important considerations and start mutually useful collaborations. I.e. consensus building.
John Maxwell wrote an analysis on your initial post on how most platform initiatives seem to fail in the EA community and that the ones that did last seemed resulted from a long stretch of consensus building (+ attentive refinement and execution in my opinion). This was useful for me to consider that more deeply as an issue in coordinating funding in the EA community. It at least led me to take smaller, tentative steps to trying things out while incorporating the advice/goals/perspectives/needs of people with deep understandings of aspects or a clear stake in using the final product.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/io6yLz6GtF6kvXt99/ideas-for-improving-funding-for-individual-eas-ea-projects#48ReFmNG5Zf3yhwk9
John Maxwell brought up some interesting points. He suggests that platforms can experience the chicken and egg problem when it comes to getting started, and that intensive networking is a way to overcome this issue. I agree that platforms often have this problem, but the EA Angel Group resolved this not by networking intensely but instead by offering a lot of value to angels. This would incentivize them to join the platform even without a large number of existing grant applicants which would in turn incentivize grant applicants to apply.
Of course, we do need a stream of incoming grant applications to remain viable, and unfortunately we encountered some unexpected issues when attempting to collaborate with EA Grants and speak to many community members as part of several strategies to acquire grant applications. As mentioned in my progress update comment, I am currently pursuing alternate strategies to achieve this objective which involve steps that I have greater control over (and less steps that require the approval of entities whose decisions I cannot influence). That being said, I think networking and collaboration is highly valuable, and am scaling that up even as I pursue strategies that do not require networking to succeed.
I wrote a progress update comment regarding the EA Angel Group which covered our grant opportunity discovery activities over the last few months. We spoke with EA Grants several months ago, and to the best of my knowledge they are still determining whether to send and receive grant applications with other funders. At least one major funding group has expressed significant interest in sending and receiving grant applications with the EA Angel Group, and we are in the process of talking with various funders about this.
I mentioned the one concern I heard and my response to it in my progress update comment:
Can you elaborate on:
Are you suggesting that funders may be concerned about adopting a protocol which ends up providing limited value? As I’ve stated in several other comments, I think sharing grant applications can be of considerable value since arbitrarily limiting the pool of projects seems pretty suboptimal.
I agree. I did some initial outreach at first and will begin additional outreach shortly.