OpenBook: New EA Grants Database
openbook.fyi is a new website where you can see ~4,000 EA grants from donors including Open Phil, FTX Future Fund, and EA Funds in a single place.
Why?
If you’re a donor: OpenBook shows you how much orgs have already received, and where other donors you respect have contributed their money.
If you’re a grant applicant: OpenBook shows you what kinds of projects your funders have previously sponsored, and also who funds projects similar to your own.
If you’re neither: browse around to get a sense of how money flows in EA!
Features
Right now, you can:
search through all grants by donor, recipient, and cause area
go to an organization’s page and see all grants they’ve given and received, plus in some cases organization details (e.g. country, GiveWell review)
view donation details (e.g. intended use of funds, notes)
see largest donors and recipients on file
add a donation that we’re missing
Features I’m thinking of adding soon:
allow edits to existing donations
standardize cause areas and add cause area pages for the most common ones where you can view and search all the grants associated with that cause area
add ACX Grants to database
allow bulk donation uploads through a CSV
let users claim a page and create an account where they can add their own donations and disable adding of others
allow for comments on organizations/grants
improve the mobile layout
make color theme changeable (just for fun)
Please let me know which of these features you’d use, or if there are other features you’d like!
Credits
Huge thanks to Vipul Naik and Issa Rice for compiling most of the data for their donations site and making it open source. This meant I mostly just had to build the UI.
And to Austin Chen for the idea, some code, and the many hours spent debugging with me.
- Mindmap with overview of EA organisations via tinyurl.com/eamindmap (and many other lists of orgs) by (15 Jun 2023 6:38 UTC; 115 points)
- EA & LW Forum Weekly Summary (30th Jan − 5th Feb 2023) by (7 Feb 2023 2:13 UTC; 21 points)
- EA & LW Forum Weekly Summary (30th Jan − 5th Feb 2023) by (LessWrong; 7 Feb 2023 2:13 UTC; 3 points)
This is so cool, thanks for doing this!
Top features for me would be:
multi-criteria search (e.g. I want to see al biosec grants made by Open Philanthropy)
CSV download to analyze the grants
standardize cause areas (possibly the first thing since people might not be aware of this)
consider talking to gwwc is it’s possible for people to link their accounts and port giving history from there. You could also consider letting people link and list their donations anonymously.
Also, how are the grants currently being added? Is it just feeding from the database that Vipul/Issa made ?
I second these suggestions. To get more specific re cause areas:
Each source uses a different naming convention (and some sources are just blank)
I’d suggest renaming that column ‘labels’ and instead mapping to just a few broadly defined buckets which add up to 100%—I’ve already done much of that mapping here
That’s great to know, thanks!
As for how grants are added, we pulled all of their data to start and then added EAF, Open Phil, and Survival and Flourishing Fund’s grants from the last year since their data wasn’t completely up to date.
Cool, thanks for setting this up!
Saw while browsing top recipients that there’s both “Centre for Effective Altruism” and “Center for Effective Altruism”, which probably should be merged?
Similarly, there’s “Against Malaria Foundation” and “Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)”
Thanks for letting me know, should be fixed now.
This is great!
Lots of cause-area-tags are wrong.
Yes, you are right! I noticed this too a few minutes after posting haha...
I think that’s just a bug in how they’re rendered after search: I believe if you click on the donation then on the donation details page the cause areas will be correct. If not, and the cause areas in the database are actually incorrect, then that’s the kind of thing I hope will get fixed to the extent that people care by allowing people to edit donations.
Anyway, I’ll try to get that fixed ASAP!Should be fixed now.
This is very helpful, thanks for doing it!
How is the maintenance of the site planned?
Is there a person in charge of periodically checking the different sources of grants and updating the page, or is there something automated?
As a possible feature it would be nice if it would show somewhere when this database was last updated :)
Yeah that’s the hard part that I’m going to be thinking about a lot this week. My guess is some funders will be easy to automatically update because they release their grants in a CSV and I already have scripts for reading them (EA funds, Open Phil), but others need to be done very manually which seems super annoying (ACX). I would probably only add the donations of major funds and not scrape people’s blogs or whatever Vipul/Issa did to add a lot of smaller donations, excepting maybe connecting with Giving What We Can from individuals’ donation data.
Anyway, I probably don’t want to spent more than ~3 hours once per month updating the data, but I’ll try to be as efficient as possible with that time!
Thanks for doing this!
In terms of feedback: the most annoying thing so far is that as soon as you click on any grant, going ‘back’ to the previous page puts you back at a completely fresh search. You can’t click to open up new tabs either.
Thanks for the feedback!
Working on it, should be fixed tomorrow.I made it so you can click to open in new tabs, but not the ‘back’ issue. That’s more difficult.
Not sure if it is still being maintained as much, but there is also the Donations List Website . I also have not looked enough into the two to understand if they are doing similar things or not but felt that is sounded similar.
Yeah, that’s where I took most of my data from. They did a great job of collecting the data which I’m super grateful for, but their UI doesn’t make it easy to find stuff, which is why I made this site.
Just a small query: Does the link require a specific server/setting to open?
Tried two different browsers on two different devices but the link just won’t open.
Oh no! Which browsers were you using?
It might just be that the site loads a lot of data so if you don’t have good service/wifi it won’t work.
I am using Chrome and Firefox. My network speed is decent(plays 2k res with ease)
Please check as it’s showing server not found...
Very cool, thanks for making this! Where does the data come from? How is it decided which orgs are included?
The data mostly comes from Vipul’s donations site. On top of that we added last years EAF, Open Phil, and SFF grants, and removed some Bill and Melinda Gates/Vitalik Buterin donations that dominated the data but weren’t very EA.
Are there any funders we’re missing that you’d want to be added?