The impact purchase has so far distributed $5k, out of $10k planned for 2015.
(If you don't know what the impact purchase is: the original announcement is here; my post on "certificates of impact" is here; Ben Kuhn posted a better explanation here; past results are here.)
We’re going to spend the final $5k in December. The last round is going to be significantly simplified, both for applicants and for us. Here’s how it will work:
- Sellers may submit a one-sentence description of what they did, an optional link, and a price at which they would be willing to "sell" some portion of the impact. This process should take only a few minutes.
- We may ask further questions or further investigate the particular projects that we are most likely to purchase.
- We, or other buyers, will accept some of the offers made in step [1]. If a price is attractive but not quite good enough then we may make a counteroffer, and haggling may ensue. The offers in step [1] aren't formally binding, so the seller can still back out (though we'd appreciate if you don't, since doing so wastes time).
As always, our evaluations will be unapologetically arbitrary, rough, and biased.
The idea that a fund outlay needs to be spent in haste since its completion date is approaching reminds me of the perverse incentives created in academic grants. What are your thoughts on simply rolling over the unspent money to increase the money you'll grant in 2016, rather than spending it in a hurry?
Several of the most promising applicants from previous rounds were willing to roll their applications to the new format. It's not clear that haste makes significant (any?) waste. We also weren't getting many new applicants per month without any new activity on our part, and we are generally interested in conserving time.
Since we never announced how much we would spend in 2016, it's hard to demonstrate that extra money is really extra.