If most of the money (even from the community) ends up going through the ‘core’ funnel, then a competitive approach would be advocacy to these groups to change their strategy, instead of providing a parallel route and hoping funders will come.
I should have been clearer in my classification of donors. Other than institutional sources (Open Phil, EA Grants, EA Funds), I see three primary categories:
EAs who are only willing to give to charities recommended by GiveWell or ACE [what I meant when I said peripheral EAs]
EAs who are willing to give to other organizations where the impact is less concrete but who do not know enough to know which project ideas are good [there may be many earning to give people in this category]
EAs who are willing to give to other organizations where the impact is less concrete and do know enough to know which project ideas are good [this is the category from which evaluators would be drawn]
My concern is that people in category 2 have to rely on the choices of institutional donors to guide them. I want people in category 2 to know about projects that are viewed highly by people in category 3 but rejected by institutional donors.
More importantly, if funders generally want to ‘find good people’, the crowd-sourced project evaluation only helps so much. For people more on the periphery of the community, this uncertainty from funders will remain even the anonymised feedback on the project is very positive.
Under the proposed system, an evaluator can endorse a project idea and/or the person. In order for a proposal to appear on the platform, there would have to be at least n idea endorsements and m personal endorsements. Thus, potential donors would know for all proposals that there are at least m core EAs who think the person is sufficiently competent.
I should have been clearer in my classification of donors. Other than institutional sources (Open Phil, EA Grants, EA Funds), I see three primary categories:
EAs who are only willing to give to charities recommended by GiveWell or ACE [what I meant when I said peripheral EAs]
EAs who are willing to give to other organizations where the impact is less concrete but who do not know enough to know which project ideas are good [there may be many earning to give people in this category]
EAs who are willing to give to other organizations where the impact is less concrete and do know enough to know which project ideas are good [this is the category from which evaluators would be drawn]
My concern is that people in category 2 have to rely on the choices of institutional donors to guide them. I want people in category 2 to know about projects that are viewed highly by people in category 3 but rejected by institutional donors.
Under the proposed system, an evaluator can endorse a project idea and/or the person. In order for a proposal to appear on the platform, there would have to be at least n idea endorsements and m personal endorsements. Thus, potential donors would know for all proposals that there are at least m core EAs who think the person is sufficiently competent.