Are impact certificates/retroactive grants the solution to grantmaking corrupting epistemics? They’re not viable for everyone, but for people like me who:
do a lot of small projects (which barely make sense to apply for grants for individually)
benefit from doing what draws their curiosity at the moment (so the delay between grant application and decision is costly)
take commitments extremely seriously (so listing a plan on a grant application is very constraining)
have enough runway that payment delays and uncertainty for any one project aren’t a big deal
They seem pretty ideal.
So why haven’t I put more effort into getting retroactive funding? The retroactive sources tend to be crowdsourced. Crowdfunding is miserable in general, and leaves you open to getting very small amounts of money, which feels worse than none at all. Right now I can always preserve the illusion I would get more money, which seems stupid. In particular even if I could get more money for a past project by selling it better and doing some follow up, that time is almost certainly better spent elsewhere.
Here is some random NFT (?) company (?) that’s doing retroactive grants to support its community builders. I am in no way endorsing this specific example as I know nothing about it, just noticing that some are trying it out.
Are impact certificates/retroactive grants the solution to grantmaking corrupting epistemics? They’re not viable for everyone, but for people like me who:
do a lot of small projects (which barely make sense to apply for grants for individually)
benefit from doing what draws their curiosity at the moment (so the delay between grant application and decision is costly)
take commitments extremely seriously (so listing a plan on a grant application is very constraining)
have enough runway that payment delays and uncertainty for any one project aren’t a big deal
They seem pretty ideal.
So why haven’t I put more effort into getting retroactive funding? The retroactive sources tend to be crowdsourced. Crowdfunding is miserable in general, and leaves you open to getting very small amounts of money, which feels worse than none at all. Right now I can always preserve the illusion I would get more money, which seems stupid. In particular even if I could get more money for a past project by selling it better and doing some follow up, that time is almost certainly better spent elsewhere.
Here is some random NFT (?) company (?) that’s doing retroactive grants to support its community builders. I am in no way endorsing this specific example as I know nothing about it, just noticing that some are trying it out.