Announcing the $200k EA Community Choice

$100k directed by community folks + $100k in quadratic funding

Aug 14, 2024

Manifund is hosting a $200k funding round for EA community projects, where the grant decisions are made by you. You can direct $100-$800 of funding towards the projects that have helped with your personal journey as an EA. Your choices then decide how $100k in matching will be allocated, via quadratic funding!

Timeline

Phase 1: Project registrations open (Aug 13)
- Project organizers can now create a page for their projects here, to raise funding as part of this EA Community Choice round.
- Community members can sign up for updates here, or recommend projects to sign up here.
Phase 2: Community members receive funds (Aug 20)
- We’ll give everyone $100 to donate; more if you’ve been active in the EA community. Fill out a 2-minute form to claim your $100, plus bonuses for:
  - Donor: $100 for taking the GWWC 🔸10% Pledge
  - Organizer: $100 for organizing any EA group
  - Scholar: $100 for having 100 or more karma on the EA Forum
  - Volunteer: $100 for volunteering at an EAG(x), Future Forum, or Manifest
  - Worker: $100 for working fulltime at an EA org, or full-time on an EA grant
  - Senior: $100 for having done any of the above prior to 2022
  - Insider: $100 if you had a Manifund account before August 2024
- You can then donate your money to any project in the Community Choice round!
- You can also leave comments about any specific project. This is a great way to share your experiences with the project organizer, or the rest of the EA community.
- Funds in Phase 2 will be capped at $100k, first-come-first-served.
Phase 3: Funds matched and sent to projects (Sep 1)
- Projects and donations will be locked in at the end of August. Then, all money donated will be matched against a $100k quadratic funding pool.
- Unlike a standard 1:1 match, quadratic funding rewards a project with lots of small donors more than a project with few big donors. The broader the support, the bigger the match!
- Specifically, the match is proportional the square of the sum of square roots of individual donations. A toy example:
- Learn more about principles behind quadratic funding by reading Vitalik Buterin’s explainer, watching this video, or playing with this simulator.

What is an EA community project?

We don’t have a strict definition, but roughly any project which helps you: learn about EA, connect with the EA community, or grow your impact in the world. We’re casting a wide net; projects do not have to explicitly identify as EA to qualify (though, we also endorse being proud of being EA). If you’re not sure if you count, just apply!

Examples of projects we’d love to fund:

Community groups
- Regional groups like EA Philippines
- Cause-specific groups like Hive
- University groups like EA Tufts
Physical spaces
- Coworking spaces like Lighthaven, Epistea, and AI Safety Serbia Hub
- Housing like CEEALAR and Berkeley REACH
Events
- Conferences like Manifest, EAGx, LessOnline, and AI, Animals, and Digital Minds
- Extended gatherings like Manifest Summer Camp or Prague Fall Season
- Recurring meetups like local groups or online EA coworking
- Tournaments like Metaculus Tournaments or The Estimation Game
- Essay competitions like EA Criticism & Red Teaming Contest
Software
- Tools like Squiggle, Carlo, Fatebook, or Guesstimate
- Visualizations like AI Digest
- Datasets like Donations List Website
Educational programs
- Incubators like AI Safety Camp and Apart Hackathons
- Course materials like AI Safety Fundamentals
Information resources
- Websites like AISafety.com
- Youtube channels like Rational Animations, Rob Miles, and A Happier World
- Podcasts like The 80k Podcast, The Dwarkesh Podcast, and The Inside View

FAQ

What is Manifund?
- Manifund is a platform for funding impactful projects. We’ve raised over $5m for hundreds of projects across causes like AI safety, biosecurity, animal welfare, EA infrastructure, and scientific research. Beyond crowdfunding, we also run programs such as AI safety regrants, impact markets, and ACX Grants.
Why are you doing this?
- We want to give the EA community a voice in what projects get funded within our own community. Today, most funding decisions are centralized in the hands of a few grantmakers, such as OpenPhil, EA Funds, and SFF. We greatly appreciate their work, but at the same time, suspect that local knowledge gets lost in this process. With EA Community Choice, we’re asking everyone to weigh from their own experiences, on what projects have helped with their personal journey towards doing good.
Why these criteria for donation bonuses?
- We chose these to highlight the different ways that someone can contribute to the EA movement. EA Community Choice aims to be more democratic than technocratic; we want to ensure a wide range of activities get recognized, and that a broad swathe of the EA community feels bought in to these donation decisions.
Why quadratic funding?
- Quadratic funding is theoretically optimal to distribute matching funds towards a selection of public goods (and we’re suckers for elegant theory). The crypto community has pioneered this with some success, eg with Gitcoin Grants and Optimism’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding rounds. Closer to home, the LessWrong Annual Review is an example of a quadratic voting system in practice, which produces pretty good results.
Where did this $200k come from?
- An anonymous individual in the EA community. Manifund would love to thank them publicly, but alas, the donor wishes not to be named for now. (It’s not FTX.)
Can I direct my funds to a project I work on or am involved with?
- Yes! We ask that you mention this as a comment on the project, but otherwise it’s fine to donate to projects you are involved with.
How should I direct my funds? Eg should I fund projects based on their past work, or how they would use marginal funding?
- We suggest based on how much value you have gotten out of it (aka retroactive instead of prospective), but it’s your charity budget; feel free to spend it as you wish.
- We’d appreciate if you leave a comment about what made you decide to give to a particular project, though this is optional.
Can I update my donations before Phase 3?
- Yes! If later donations or comments change your mind about where you want to give, you can change your allocation
If I think a project has negative externalities, can I make a “negative vote” aka pay to redirect money away from it?
- TBD. This may be theoretically optimal and has been used by other projects, but leaning no because of bad vibes/potential for drama and additional complexity it introduces.
Can I contribute my own money towards a community project?
- Yes! You can make a personal donation to any project in this community choice round; these donations will also be eligible for the quadratic funding match (as well as a 501c3 tax deduction, if you’re based in the US).
How about contributing towards the matching fund?
- Yes! We’re happy to accept donations to increase the size of the matching pool for this round. Reach out to austin@manifund.org and I’ll be happy to chat!
- Or, if you’re excited by this structure but want to try a different focus (eg a funding round for “technical AI safety projects” or “animal welfare projects”), let us know!