We’re excited to announce that EffectiveAltruism.org is hosting the 2017 effective altruism donor lottery!
A donation lottery is a different way to donate. Rather than making a donation to a charitable organization directly, you can make a donation to a donor lottery. You then get a shot at being able to recommend where the entire pool of money goes, in proportion to the size of your donation.
The concept was described by Carl Shulman in 2016, and in late 2016, Carl and Paul Christiano successfully ran the first donor lottery.
Carl and Paul have asked the Centre for Effective Altruism (the organization that runs EffectiveAltruism.org) to take on the responsibility of running this year’s lottery. As with the original lottery, Paul is acting as lottery guarantor, backstopping the lottery pot size of $100,000.
As this is the first time we’ve run the lottery on EffectiveAltruism.org, we’re considering this section of the site to be in open beta. If you notice anything that looks out of place, if anything in the explanation is unclear, or anything doesn’t work as expected, we’d really appreciate your feedback, either via the chat bubble at the bottom right of the screen, via lottery [at] effectivealtruism [dot] org, or in the comments below.
Sam Deere
Tech lead, Centre for Effective Altruism
If a lottery organization is conducting a draw itself, and could rig the draw, publishing the winner's identity allows people to detect fraud, e.g. if the lottery commissioner's family members keep winning that would indicate skulduggery. I think this is the usual reason for requiring publicity. Did you have another in mind?
In the case of CEA's lottery (and last year's lottery), the actual draw is the U.S. National Institute of Science and Technology public randomness beacon, outside of CEA's control, which allows every participant to know whether their #s were drawn.
Someone raised the possibility of people who didn't want publicity/celebrity being discouraged from making use of the option, as part of the general aim of making it usable to as many donors as possible.