I—thoughtlessly—hadn’t considered donating to the SIAI as a matter of course until recently (helped do a fund raiser for something else through my company and this made me think about it). Now reading the documentation on GuideStar has me thinking about it more...
Looking at the SIAI filings, I’d be interested in knowing more about the ~$118k that was misappropriated by a contractor (reported in 2009). I hadn’t heard of that before. For an organization that raises less than or close to half a million a year, that’s a painful blow.
Peter Thiel’s contributions compose a significant part of the SIAI’s income. I notice that in 2009, the organization raised less than $100k from non-‘excess’ contributions. In other words, the organization is largely funded by a small group of big donors. I wonder how this compares to other organizations of a similar size? Is there a life-cycle to bootstrapping organizations where they transition from small pools of big donors to more stable funding by a broad contributor base?
Naive Googling says that grant writing is the traditional way for an organization to get funds. I think there is low hanging fruit here. In 2009, SIAI received no grants. Can the Less Wrong community create a task force with the purpose of learning about grant writing and then executing on a few?
What about enumerating non-standard approaches? For example, the Less Wrong community consists of a large number of software developers. Would it be possible to create a task force to create a software product with the purpose of donating it’s revenue to the SIAI? (Various corporate non-competes might be a barrier, but maybe companies would give dispensation for charity work?)
Right now SIAI appears to be primarily dependent on several key contributors and conference income. Expenditures are close to revenue, so they don’t have much in the way of savings. Diversifying income, building up savings...probably goals we can help the organization achieve.
(Removed my post to clean it up, get verification on a bunch of stuff and ensure I’m not doing any unexpected damage.)
I—thoughtlessly—hadn’t considered donating to the SIAI as a matter of course until recently (helped do a fund raiser for something else through my company and this made me think about it). Now reading the documentation on GuideStar has me thinking about it more...
Looking at the SIAI filings, I’d be interested in knowing more about the ~$118k that was misappropriated by a contractor (reported in 2009). I hadn’t heard of that before. For an organization that raises less than or close to half a million a year, that’s a painful blow.
Peter Thiel’s contributions compose a significant part of the SIAI’s income. I notice that in 2009, the organization raised less than $100k from non-‘excess’ contributions. In other words, the organization is largely funded by a small group of big donors. I wonder how this compares to other organizations of a similar size? Is there a life-cycle to bootstrapping organizations where they transition from small pools of big donors to more stable funding by a broad contributor base?
Naive Googling says that grant writing is the traditional way for an organization to get funds. I think there is low hanging fruit here. In 2009, SIAI received no grants. Can the Less Wrong community create a task force with the purpose of learning about grant writing and then executing on a few?
What about enumerating non-standard approaches? For example, the Less Wrong community consists of a large number of software developers. Would it be possible to create a task force to create a software product with the purpose of donating it’s revenue to the SIAI? (Various corporate non-competes might be a barrier, but maybe companies would give dispensation for charity work?)
Right now SIAI appears to be primarily dependent on several key contributors and conference income. Expenditures are close to revenue, so they don’t have much in the way of savings. Diversifying income, building up savings...probably goals we can help the organization achieve.
(Removed my post to clean it up, get verification on a bunch of stuff and ensure I’m not doing any unexpected damage.)