I commented on a draft of this post. I haven’t re-read it in full, so I don’t know to what degree my comments were incorporated. Based on a quick glance it seems they weren’t, so I thought I’d copy the main comments I left on that draft. My main point is that I think inserting regional groups into the funding landscape would likely worsen rather than improve the funding situation. I still think regional groups seem promising for other reasons.
Some of my comments (copy-paste, quickly written):
[Regarding applying for funding:] At a high level, my guess would be that this solution would increase overhead and friction in distributing money, rather than reducing it. I think setting up lots of regional grantmakers is a lot of work
That said, I think regional groups can be very useful and valuable for other reasons. Just don’t really think they should do grantmaking.
I’m worried about different regional groups applying inconsistent quality service, and/or inconsistent criteria in distributing money
I think we should think of ways to address the psychological issue of people being afraid, rather than building a lot of structure around this
I think [the EAIF would] have a pretty easy time setting up more scalable systems [once there is a much larger number of groups]
E.g. we could set up more standardized, faster processes for grant applications that fit certain categories that can be quickly reviewed by less senior people. The bottleneck for setting up such a system is having a sufficient number of applications for it to be worth doing
You also need to build the infrastructure for making the payments themselves efficiently, doing the financial accounting, running an entity, tax reporting, etc. – (…)
I think people routinely underestimate the time cost of running a legal entity with a lot of activity. I wish people generally try really hard to eliminate any unnecessary operational busywork. Instead, we should focus relentlessly on the EA content and promising people, and use very pragmatic fast solutions for handling admin things
I commented on a draft of this post. I haven’t re-read it in full, so I don’t know to what degree my comments were incorporated. Based on a quick glance it seems they weren’t, so I thought I’d copy the main comments I left on that draft. My main point is that I think inserting regional groups into the funding landscape would likely worsen rather than improve the funding situation. I still think regional groups seem promising for other reasons.
Some of my comments (copy-paste, quickly written):