Thanks for the questions! Most of our due diligence happens in the step where the Manifund team decides whether to approve a particular grant; this generally happens after a grant has met its minimum funding bar and the grantee has signed our standard grant agreement (example). At that point, our due diligence usually consists of reviewing their proposal as written for charitable eligibility, as well as a brief online search, looking through the grant recipient's eg LinkedIn and other web presences to get a sense of who they are. For larger grants on our platform (eg $10k+), we usually have additional confidence that the grant is legitimate coming from the donors or regrantors themselves.

In your specific example, it's very possible that I personally could have missed cross-verifying your claim of attending Yale (with the likelihood decreasing the larger the grant is for). Part of what's different about our operations is that we open up the screening process so that anyone on the internet can chime in if they see something amiss; to date we've paused two grants (out of ~160) based on concerns raised from others.

I believe we're classified as a public charity and take on expenditure responsibility for our grants, via the terms of our grant agreement and the status updates we ask for from grantees.

And yes, our general philosophy is that Manifund as a platform is responsible for ensuring that a grant is legitimate under US 501c3 law, while being agnostic about the impact of specific grants -- that's the role of donors and regrantors on our platform.

I'd really appreciate you leaving thoughts on the projects, even if you decided not to fund them. I expect that most project organizers would also appreciate your feedback, to help them understand where their proposals as written are falling short. Copy & paste of your personal notes would be great!

Hey! It is not too late; in fact, people can continue signing up to claim and direct funds anytime before phase 3.

(I'm still working on publishing the form; if it's not up today, I'll let y'all know and would expect it to be up soon after)

It's hard to say much about the source of funding without leaking too much information; I think I can say that they're a committed EA who has been around the community a while, who I deeply respect and is generally excited to give the community a voice.

FWIW, I think the connection between Manifest and "receiving funding from Manifund or EA Community Choice" is pretty tenuous. Peter Wildeford who you quoted has both raised $10k for IAPS on Manifund and donated $5k personally towards a EA community project. This, of course, does not indicate that Peter supports Manifest to any degree whatsoever; rather, it shows that sharing a funding platform is a very low bar for association.

Appreciate the questions! In general, I'm not super concerned about adversarial action this time around, since:

• I generally trust people in the community to do the right thing
• The money can't be withdrawn to your own pocket, so the worst case is that some people get to direct more funding than they properly deserve
• The total funding at stake is relatively small
• We reserve the right to modify this, if we see people trying to exploit things

Specifically:

1.  I plan to mostly rely on self-reports, plus maybe quick sanity checks that a particular person actually exists.
   1. Though, if we're scaling this up for future rounds, a neat solution I just thought of would be to require people to buy in a little bit, eg they have to donate $10 of their own money to unlock the funds. This would act as a stake towards telling the truth -- if we determine that someone is misrepresenting their qualifications then they lose their stake too.
2. Haha, I love that post (and left some comments from our past experience running QF). We don't have clever tricks planned to address those shortcomings; I do think collusion and especially usability are problems with QF in general (though, Vitalik has some proposal on bounded pairwise QF that might address collusion?)
   
   We're going with QF because it's a schelling point/rallying flag for getting people interested in weird funding mechanisms. It's not perfect, but it's been tested enough in the wild for us to have some literature behind it, while not having much actual exposure within EA. If we run this again, I'd be open to mechanism changes!
3. We don't permit people to create a bunch of accounts to claim the bonus multiple times; we'd look to prevent this by tracking the signup behavior on Manifund. Also, all donation activity is done in public, so I think there will be other scrutiny of weird funding patterns.
   
   Meanwhile I think sharing this on X and encouraging their followers to participate is pretty reasonable -- while we're targeting EA Community Choice at medium-to-highly engaged EAs, I do also hope that this would draw some new folks into our scene!

Yes, we're happy to allocate funds to the org that ran that initiative for them to spend unrestricted towards other future initiatives!

Yes, community members can donate in any proportion to the projects in this round. The math of quadratic funding roughly means that your first $1 to a project receives the largest match, then the next $3, then the next $5, $7, etc. Or: your match to a project is proportional to the square root of how much you've donated.

You can get some intuition by playing with the linked simulator; we'll also show calculations about current match rates directly on our website. But you also don't have to worry very much about the quadratic funding equation if you don't want to, and you can just send money to whatever projects you like!

Glad you like it! As you might guess, the community response to this first round will inform what we do with this in the future. If a lot of people and projects participate, then we'll be a lot more excited to run further iterations and raise more funding for this kind of event; I think success with this round would encourage larger institutional donors to want to participate.

1. It currently seems unlikely that we could raise a sizable matching pool (or initial funding pool) from small donations; I think like $100k at a minimum for making this kind of thing worth running. If people want to send small donations, I'd encourage those to go directly to the projects we host!
   
   re: ongoing process, the quadratic funding mechanism typically plays out across different rounds -- though I have speculated about an ongoing version before.
2. We don't have specific, formal plans to use the microregrantor decisions in this round for other purposes, but of course if we notice people leaving thoughtful comments and giving excellent donations in this round, we'll take notice and consider them for future regranting and other opportunities!
   
   Also, all the granting decisions here will be done in public, so I highly encourage other EA orgs to use the data generated for their own purposes (eg evaluating potential new grantmakers).

He was not.

Indeed, I spoke loosely and the sentence would have been more accurate if I had replaced "57 speakers" with "57 special guests", for which I apologize. I don't consider this to be a major distinction, however, and have used these terms fairly interchangeably throughout event planning. It's a quirk of how we run Manifest, where there are many blurry boundaries.

Most, but not all of our "special guests" presented a session^[1]. Not all of the sessions were presented by special guests: Manifest allowed any attendee to book a room to run a talk/session/workshop/event of their choice (though, we the organizers did arrange many of the largest sessions ourselves.) Most special guests did not receive housing or travel assistance; I think we provided this to 10-15 of them. Not all of our special guests even received complimentary tickets: some, such as Eliezer, Katja, Nate and Sarah, paid for their tickets before we reached out to them; we're very grateful for this! And we also issued complimentary tickets to many folks, without listing them as special guests.

What is true about all our special guests is that we chose them for being notable people, who we imagined our attendees would like to meet. They were listed on our website and received a differently-colored badge. They were also all offered a spot at a special (off campus) dinner on Saturday night, in addition to those who bought supporter tickets.

1. ^{^}

   Off the top of my head, these special guests did not give talks: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Katja Grace, Joe Carlsmith, Clara Collier, Max Tabarrok, Sarah Constantin, Rob Miles, Richard Hanania, Nate Soares