Honestly, I’m still pretty new to the grantmaking game, so I haven’t decided on a plan of exactly what to communicate or what detail to provide. Your nudge is helpful! One of my hopes for the fund is to raise the profile of those who are doing good work, so I expect that I’ll do something in that direction. But again, I haven’t decided on exactly what.
Also hard to say where the bottleneck will be at this early stage. Peter has suggested that more funding is on the way if there are good opportunities, so my naive guess is either applications or reviewer time unless a real whale comes along.
If you have additional suggestions for how to do grantmaking well, or just feel like chatting, send me a DM/email. :)
In terms of publicizing: one cheap thing is just to nudge grantees to post some version of their application to Manifund and/or grantmaking.ai. (Or even just LessWrong/EA Forum).
This might be especially valuable for the ones you do fund (for transparency + follow up funding from others); for ones close to the bar (in case somebody else likes them); or for strong applications you thought weren’t in scope for your fund.
Let me know if there’s a way we could make this easy for you or your applicants!
Sweet. I’ll definitely be nudging my applicants that way, as well as asking for opt-in sharing in August.
It’s going reasonably well so far. I’ve awarded $27k in retroactive funding prizes to six researchers (not sure if I want to announce those now or wait to combine them with the additional $40k in September...) mostly to get my feet wet and work out the process/paperwork. So far I’ve gotten seven emails, three of which were for prizes and four were for grants. I’m definitely hungry for more applications, especially from researchers who are actually corrigibility-oriented rather than shoehorning it into their existing work.
Good to know, will keep that in mind in case we see more corrigibility work!
I suggest announcing grants as you go along, eg on Twitter and/or on some LessWrong post for the ones you’ve already funded. I think publicity helps generate more dealflow, and my guess is that the researchers would also appreciate the shoutout.
FWIW Leo’s microgrants did start with just “email me” but then he moved to https://tally.so/r/D4WlbR pretty soon, which I’d lightly recommend making an option at some point—both to make things easier for you, and also maybe some grantees feel more comfortable with the affordance of “fill out form” than “email random stranger”
I would love if you allowed people to opt-in to sharing their application publicly, so we could share it broadly on grantmaking.ai. Who knows, maybe other funders will want to help you fund great stuff.
Also, if you’re able to post grants awarded publicly, we’d also love to copy them on to our platform as well
We’re trying to surface great funding opportunities for funders and show awesome grants, so people in the ecosystem can see where money is moving and what great work entails.
Honestly, I’m still pretty new to the grantmaking game, so I haven’t decided on a plan of exactly what to communicate or what detail to provide. Your nudge is helpful! One of my hopes for the fund is to raise the profile of those who are doing good work, so I expect that I’ll do something in that direction. But again, I haven’t decided on exactly what.
Also hard to say where the bottleneck will be at this early stage. Peter has suggested that more funding is on the way if there are good opportunities, so my naive guess is either applications or reviewer time unless a real whale comes along.
If you have additional suggestions for how to do grantmaking well, or just feel like chatting, send me a DM/email. :)
We just wrote up some of our considerations around what kinds of bottlenecks show up in new grant programs, you might enjoy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wXszdeSmJeHfW2ayw/money-taste-dealflow-hustle-trust
(also curious how things are going so far!)
In terms of publicizing: one cheap thing is just to nudge grantees to post some version of their application to Manifund and/or grantmaking.ai. (Or even just LessWrong/EA Forum).
This might be especially valuable for the ones you do fund (for transparency + follow up funding from others); for ones close to the bar (in case somebody else likes them); or for strong applications you thought weren’t in scope for your fund.
Let me know if there’s a way we could make this easy for you or your applicants!
Sweet. I’ll definitely be nudging my applicants that way, as well as asking for opt-in sharing in August.
It’s going reasonably well so far. I’ve awarded $27k in retroactive funding prizes to six researchers (not sure if I want to announce those now or wait to combine them with the additional $40k in September...) mostly to get my feet wet and work out the process/paperwork. So far I’ve gotten seven emails, three of which were for prizes and four were for grants. I’m definitely hungry for more applications, especially from researchers who are actually corrigibility-oriented rather than shoehorning it into their existing work.
Good to know, will keep that in mind in case we see more corrigibility work!
I suggest announcing grants as you go along, eg on Twitter and/or on some LessWrong post for the ones you’ve already funded. I think publicity helps generate more dealflow, and my guess is that the researchers would also appreciate the shoutout.
FWIW Leo’s microgrants did start with just “email me” but then he moved to https://tally.so/r/D4WlbR pretty soon, which I’d lightly recommend making an option at some point—both to make things easier for you, and also maybe some grantees feel more comfortable with the affordance of “fill out form” than “email random stranger”
I would love if you allowed people to opt-in to sharing their application publicly, so we could share it broadly on grantmaking.ai. Who knows, maybe other funders will want to help you fund great stuff.
Also, if you’re able to post grants awarded publicly, we’d also love to copy them on to our platform as well
We’re trying to surface great funding opportunities for funders and show awesome grants, so people in the ecosystem can see where money is moving and what great work entails.
Will do! Is there an email (or whatever) that I should use for collaborating?
Oh sorry we missed this—grantmaking.ai offers hi@grantmaking.ai, and I’m also always available at austin@manifund.org