Project Summary

Vipul created a website that lists thousands of EA-related donations, including from all of the major EA donors like OpenPhil, FTX Future Fund, and EA Funds, from EA-adjacent donors like Vitalik Buterin and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and individual donors like Julia Wise.

This grant is retroactive funding for the work he’s already done on the website.

Project goals

I (Rachel) can’t speak for Vipul’s goals in deciding to create this website, but here are some good things I think it helps accomplish:

• Increase transparency: OpenPhil and GiveWell have worked hard to be transparent, but the benefits of transparency–gaining trust, getting feedback, and sparking public discussion–are further realized when data is not only possible to access but easy to access. And in the case of analyzing EA as a whole, or analyzing a cause area as a whole, looking at where one funder gave isn’t as useful as having an aggregate database.

• Make it easier to people trying to get funding for projects to figure out where they should apply, by making it easy to see where other projects got funded.

• Make it easier for grant makers to see the funding history of organizations they’re considering donating to.

• Give people in EA something many of them directly asked for.

How will this funding be used?

This is retro funding. It is just a reward and will not be used for any particular purpose.

How could this project be actively harmful?

I don’t really see how it could be, other than perhaps by diverting Vipul’s time from something higher impact.

(An alternative possibility worth mentioning is that maybe being more transparent ends up damaging EA’s reputation, but in that case the reputation kind of ought to be damaged. If funding is going to reasonable places, I expect transparency does more to increase trust than to harm reputation.)

What other funding is this person getting?

None.