openbook.fyi is a new website where you can see ~4,000 EA grants from donors including Open Phil, FTX Future Fund, and EA Funds in a single place.
Why?
If you're a donor: OpenBook shows you how much orgs have already received, and where other donors you respect have contributed their money.
If you're a grant applicant: OpenBook shows you what kinds of projects your funders have previously sponsored, and also who funds projects similar to your own.
If you're neither: browse around to get a sense of how money flows in EA!
Features
Right now, you can:
- search through all grants by donor, recipient, and cause area
- go to an organization's page and see all grants they've given and received, plus in some cases organization details (e.g. country, GiveWell review)
- view donation details (e.g. intended use of funds, notes)
- see largest donors and recipients on file
- add a donation that we're missing
Features I'm thinking of adding soon:
- allow edits to existing donations
- standardize cause areas and add cause area pages for the most common ones where you can view and search all the grants associated with that cause area
- add ACX Grants to database
- allow bulk donation uploads through a CSV
- let users claim a page and create an account where they can add their own donations and disable adding of others
- allow for comments on organizations/grants
- improve the mobile layout
- make color theme changeable (just for fun)
Please let me know which of these features you'd use, or if there are other features you'd like!
Credits
Huge thanks to Vipul Naik and Issa Rice for compiling most of the data for their donations site and making it open source. This meant I mostly just had to build the UI.
And to Austin Chen for the idea, some code, and the many hours spent debugging with me.
This is very helpful, thanks for doing it!
How is the maintenance of the site planned?
Is there a person in charge of periodically checking the different sources of grants and updating the page, or is there something automated?
As a possible feature it would be nice if it would show somewhere when this database was last updated :)
Yeah that's the hard part that I'm going to be thinking about a lot this week. My guess is some funders will be easy to automatically update because they release their grants in a CSV and I already have scripts for reading them (EA funds, Open Phil), but others need to be done very manually which seems super annoying (ACX). I would probably only add the donations of major funds and not scrape people's blogs or whatever Vipul/Issa did to add a lot of smaller donations, excepting maybe connecting with Giving What We Can from individuals' donation data.
Anyway, I probably don't want to spent more than ~3 hours once per month updating the data, but I'll try to be as efficient as possible with that time!