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This is: Which Community Building Projects Get Funded?, published by AnonymousEAForumAccount on the AI Alignment Forum.
Disclosure: This analysis is mine alone, and does not reflect the belief of any individuals or organizations I’m affiliated with. To protect my anonymity I’m not providing a full history of my experiences with the programs I’ve analyzed, but readers can assume that I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to get funding through one or more of the channels discussed below and could potentially benefit from changes to these grantmaking processes.
Most Effective Altruists (myself included) would agree that the stronger the EA community is, the more good it will be able to accomplish. This idea has motivated the development of multiple programs that have granted millions of dollars to dozens of organizations, groups, and individuals working on “community building” (CB).
This analysis examines the processes and grant history of three grantmaking channels: EA Community Building Grants (CBGs), EA Grants, and the EA Meta Fund. Evaluating the efficacy of specific grantees or grantmakers is not feasible given the large number of grants, their broad scope, and the lack of publicly available information about many of the projects that have been funded. While I don’t want to be critical of any particular grantee, grantmaker, or platform, I do want to call attention to concerning patterns revealed by a meta-analysis of these grantmaking channels in aggregate.
Below, I show that all three of these grantmaking channels use processes that implicitly or explicitly restrict the number and type of CB projects that are considered. The outcome of these processes have been grants that primarily fund CB projects in close geographical proximity to the grantmakers. Just over half of CB funding has gone to people or projects closely connected to “Oxbridge” (Oxford or Cambridge) or London, and 85% of funding has gone to European efforts.
As discussed in more detail in the section on the Meta Fund, this concentration isn’t simply a result of the largest CB organizations being based in Oxford or London. Nor is it the result of the EA community itself being geographically concentrated. While the community does have some large hubs, individual EAs (per the EA Survey) and EA groups (per EA Hub) are significantly more dispersed than CB funding.
The landscape for CB funding is shifting rapidly. There’s been some turnover in the leadership of specific funding channels, CEA recently announced a new CEO, and the EA Grants program might be discontinued altogether. This creates an opportunity to reflect on how CB funding can best be structured going forward. I hope my analysis helps ground this discussion in hard data and highlights some of the issues that new processes should try to resolve. If my findings are correct, there are likely valuable CB projects from certain geographic regions and/or interpersonal networks that are being neglected.
Note: It’s clear which locations are funded by EA Community Building Grants. However, more interpretation is required for the Meta Fund and EA Grants, as many grantees belong to multiple geographic networks. To highlight the patterns I’ve observed, the preceding table and subsequent analyses attribute grants to the Oxbridge/London network where grantees have, or previously had, strong ties to that area. For instance, a Meta Fund grant allowing an Oxford graduate to study at Harvard is attributed to the Oxbridge/London area, rather than the Rest of World or a split between Oxbridge/London and the Rest of World. Similarly, the Other Europe category is best thought of as “tied to Europe (but not Oxbridge/London)”, the Bay Area category as “tied to Bay (but not Europe)”, and the Rest of World as “no ties to Europe or Bay”. All calculations and categorizations can be found ...
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