Impact purchase: changes and round 2

The deadline for round two of the impact purchase is April 25. Apply here!

We’ve made a few changes:

Timing

We are now willing to purchase projects from any year.

Joint projects

Our guidelines on joint projects were vague and confusing. Here’s the new policy:

• You can sell anything you did.
• You can sell your contribution to any project, even if that contribution wouldn’t have any value without the rest of the project.

For example, you can sell (the provision of):  10% of the flour for a cake, the flour for a cake,  the ingredients for a cake, a cake for a party, all the food for a party, a party.

• We’ll usually evaluate contributions to projects conservatively; if we can’t determine the relative importance of different contributions, we may not be willing to pay much for any of them. 

For example, we might be willing to pay $10 for a cake, but only $2 for providing the ingredients or $3 for providing the labor. In general, the prices of the pieces will add up to less than the price of the project, because we don’t know how to assign credit amongst the pieces.

• If you were paid to do something, we probably won’t buy it.
• A group can sell anything the group did, if they decide unanimously what to do with the proceeds (for example, they can decide how to split the proceeds, or they can decide to use them to fund another project).
• A group of people can also unanimously decide how to distribute the certificate for a project done by the group, and then any member of the group can sell up to half of their share of that certificate.

Purchasing certificates

A handful of people have expressed interest in buying certificates, so we may run a two-sided auction starting in either May or June. Let us know if you are interested in purchasing certificates, by emailing [email protected]. If you are interested, we will send you the publicly available parts of the project descriptions--everything other than the asking price and anything that the seller asked us to keep private. You can submit buy orders if any of the offered projects look exciting (we'll describe the mechanics to the buyers at that time---the changes will be transparent and strategically irrelevant to the sellers).