Hey there~ I'm Austin, currently building https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com, or find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
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:
Specifically:
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.
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.
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
For the EA Phillipines grant, curious if the $43k granted is inclusive of two donations made through Manifund? On https://manifund.org/projects/support-a-thriving-and-talented-community-of-ea-filipinos- , there were two large donations of 43000/4 = 10750, and I know that at least Anton was a participant in MCF.
This is totally fine fwiw (we're very happy to have these on Manifund!), I'm just checking so we don't double-assign credit for these donations.
Some reflections on the Manifest 2024 discourse:
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)