EA experimentation is fantastic, but it’s really difficult to set up an official nonprofit for each experiment. Therefore if we want to help fund experimentation, it’s good to do so at earlier stages than official nonprofit registration.
A few of us at .impact have started experimenting with Gratipay to put money the hands of EAs. Gratipay works by providing a system for some people to make weekly donations to individuals or projects. The founders of Gratipay are themselves paid for on Gratipay, so there they take no financial cut (they do charge around 3% for credit card fees). So far it does not support charity deductions, but it’s not meant for that. It’s meant to share money with people.
We’ve started an ‘Effective Altruist’ community of 30 people with profiles and donations. While there haven’t been many donors yet, there have been several people who posted profiles of what they are up to and they intend to continue doing. There are larger groups such as Charity Science , new ones like Effective Altruism Berkeley, and many individuals like Diego Caleiro, Tom Ash, and Justin Shovelain. A few professionals are there who don’t request funding, but still appreciate tokens of appreciation.
If you’re interested in helping funding some EA groups or people, it’s super easy to get started. If you have a project and want funding, it’s super easy to make a page. If you’re just curious what’s going on, there are many profiles to look through.
There are some limitations. Gratipay is not great for one-time payments, group ‘Kickstarter’ payments, or incentivized ‘unlock’ payments, registered charity payments, and I’m sure a long list of other things. That said, Gratipay is a really simple way for us to get started.
I'm excited for this decentralized funding community, and I'm very grateful for the $248 I've personally collected through the service to date. However, I feel like individual funders need to further elaborate on what they're funding needs are, what they would do with marginal funds, and a brief sketch of how they expect to have an impact.
I just updated my profile to give an example of what I would mean (in my case, it's an example of how funding me does not lead to impact).
Diego's profile is the closest to what I'm looking for, though I'd want to know more about what he plans for each of his projects and why his living expenses are >$50K a year. (This is not meant to call out Diego in particular, so sorry if that's the case!)
I'll soon edit my profile with my EA plan.
My living costs are much closer to 25k a year than to 50k actually. Additional donations, far from my current funding, would go into other things that can be found described in my Patreon account. I believe my Patreon account maps better into what you think people should be doing on Gratipay. I posted recently about shifting to Patreon while costs are low on the EA facebook group, and some people agreed that was a good idea.
Regardless, there is a much more important issue from my point of view: donating to indivi... (read more)