Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
Comment Permalink
jacquesthibs2
0
0

Thanks for doing this!

In terms of feedback: the most annoying thing so far is that as soon as you click on any grant, going 'back' to the previous page puts you back at a completely fresh search. You can't click to open up new tabs either.

Reply
Rachel Weinberg2
0
0

Thanks for the feedback! Working on it, should be fixed tomorrow.

I made it so you can click to open in new tabs, but not the 'back' issue. That's more difficult.

Reply
See in context
by Rachel Weinberg, Austin
1 min read 19

205

CommunityEffective givingData on the EA communityGrantmakingCommunity infrastructureEffective altruism funding
Frontpage

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.

205

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Mentioned in
Comments20


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸20
8
0

This is so cool, thanks for doing this!

Top features for me would be:

  • multi-criteria search (e.g. I want to see al biosec grants made by Open Philanthropy)
  • CSV download to analyze the grants
  • standardize cause areas (possibly the first thing since people might not be aware of this)
  • consider talking to gwwc is it's possible for people to link their accounts and port giving history from there. You could also consider letting people link and list their donations anonymously.

Also, how are the grants currently being added? Is it just feeding from the database that Vipul/Issa made ?

Reply
TylerMaule2
0
0

I second these suggestions. To get more specific re cause areas:

  • Each source uses a different naming convention (and some sources are just blank)
  • I'd suggest renaming that column 'labels' and instead mapping to just a few broadly defined buckets which add up to 100%—I've already done much of that mapping here
Reply
Rachel Weinberg2
0
0

That's great to know, thanks!

As for how grants are added, we pulled all of their data to start and then added EAF, Open Phil, and Survival and Flourishing Fund's grants from the last year since their data wasn't completely up to date.

Reply
MaxRa9
2
0

Cool, thanks for setting this up! 

Saw while browsing top recipients that there's both "Centre for Effective Altruism" and "Center for Effective Altruism", which probably should be merged?

Reply
[anonymous]8
0
0

Similarly, there's "Against Malaria Foundation" and "Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)"

Reply
Rachel Weinberg4
0
0

Thanks for letting me know, should be fixed now.

Reply
[comment deleted]1
0
0
Deleted by Rachel Weinberg,
Zach Stein-Perlman5
2
0

This is great!

Lots of cause-area-tags are wrong.

Reply
Rachel Weinberg4
0
0

Yes, you are right! I noticed this too a few minutes after posting haha...

I think that's just a bug in how they're rendered after search: I believe if you click on the donation then on the donation details page the cause areas will be correct. If not, and the cause areas in the database are actually incorrect, then that's the kind of thing I hope will get fixed to the extent that people care by allowing people to edit donations. Anyway, I'll try to get that fixed ASAP!

Should be fixed now.

Reply
JaimeRV2
0
0

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 :)

Reply
Rachel Weinberg2
0
0

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!

Reply
jacquesthibs2
0
0

Thanks for doing this!

In terms of feedback: the most annoying thing so far is that as soon as you click on any grant, going 'back' to the previous page puts you back at a completely fresh search. You can't click to open up new tabs either.

Reply
Rachel Weinberg2
0
0

Thanks for the feedback! Working on it, should be fixed tomorrow.

I made it so you can click to open in new tabs, but not the 'back' issue. That's more difficult.

Reply
Benevolent_Rain1
0
0

Not sure if it is still being maintained as much, but there is also the Donations List Website . I also have not looked enough into the two to understand if they are doing similar things or not but felt that is sounded similar.

Reply
Rachel Weinberg5
1
0

Yeah, that's where I took most of my data from. They did a great job of collecting the data which I'm super grateful for, but their UI doesn't make it easy to find stuff, which is why I made this site.

Reply
Damin Curtis🔹1
0
0

Very cool, thanks for making this! Where does the data come from? How is it decided which orgs are included?

Reply
Rachel Weinberg1
0
0

The data mostly comes from Vipul's donations site. On top of that we added last years EAF, Open Phil, and SFF grants, and removed some Bill and Melinda Gates/Vitalik Buterin donations that dominated the data but weren't very EA. 

Are there any funders we're missing that you'd want to be added?

Reply
Maynk021
0
0

Just a small query: Does the link require a specific server/setting to open? 

Tried two different browsers on two different  devices but the link just won't open.

Reply
Rachel Weinberg1
0
0

Oh no! Which browsers were you using?

It might just be that the site loads a lot of data so if you don't have good service/wifi it won't work.

Reply
Maynk021
0
0

I am using Chrome and Firefox. My network speed is decent(plays 2k res with ease)
Please check as it's showing server not found...

Reply
More from Rachel Weinberg
217
Announcing Manifund Regrants
2 authors
· · 5m read
51
51
41
Invest in ACX Grants projects!
3 authors
· · 3m read
7
7
55
Intro Fellowship as Retreat: Reasons, Retrospective, and Resources
Rachel Weinberg
· · 15m read
6
6
View more
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 32m read
 · 
Summary Immediate skin-to-skin contact (SSC) between mothers and newborns and early initiation of breastfeeding (EIBF) may play a significant and underappreciated role in reducing neonatal mortality. These practices are distinct in important ways from more broadly recognized (and clearly impactful) interventions like kangaroo care and exclusive breastfeeding, and they are recommended for both preterm and full-term infants. A large evidence base indicates that immediate SSC and EIBF substantially reduce neonatal mortality. Many randomized trials show that immediate SSC promotes EIBF, reduces episodes of low blood sugar, improves temperature regulation, and promotes cardiac and respiratory stability. All of these effects are linked to lower mortality, and the biological pathways between immediate SSC, EIBF, and reduced mortality are compelling. A meta-analysis of large observational studies found a 25% lower risk of mortality in infants who began breastfeeding within one hour of birth compared to initiation after one hour. These practices are attractive targets for intervention, and promoting them is effective. Immediate SSC and EIBF require no commodities, are under the direct influence of birth attendants, are time-bound to the first hour after birth, are consistent with international guidelines, and are appropriate for universal promotion. Their adoption is often low, but ceilings are demonstrably high: many low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) have rates of EIBF less than 30%, yet several have rates over 70%. Multiple studies find that health worker training and quality improvement activities dramatically increase rates of immediate SSC and EIBF. There do not appear to be any major actors focused specifically on promotion of universal immediate SSC and EIBF. By contrast, general breastfeeding promotion and essential newborn care training programs are relatively common. More research on cost-effectiveness is needed, but it appears promising. Limited existing
 ·  · 2m read
 · 
Summary: The NAO will increase our sequencing significantly over the next few months, funded by a $3M grant from Open Philanthropy. This will allow us to scale our pilot early-warning system to where we could flag many engineered pathogens early enough to mitigate their worst impacts, and also generate large amounts of data to develop, tune, and evaluate our detection systems. One of the biological threats the NAO is most concerned with is a 'stealth' pathogen, such as a virus with the profile of a faster-spreading HIV. This could cause a devastating pandemic, and early detection would be critical to mitigate the worst impacts. If such a pathogen were to spread, however, we wouldn't be able to monitor it with traditional approaches because we wouldn't know what to look for. Instead, we have invested in metagenomic sequencing for pathogen-agnostic detection. This doesn't require deciding what sequences to look for up front: you sequence the nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) and analyze them computationally for signs of novel pathogens. We've primarily focused on wastewater because it has such broad population coverage: a city in a cup of sewage. On the other hand, wastewater is difficult because the fraction of nucleic acids that come from any given virus is very low,[1] and so you need quite deep sequencing to find something. Fortunately, sequencing has continued to come down in price, to under $1k per billion read pairs. This is an impressive reduction, 1/8 of what we estimated two years ago when we first attempted to model the cost-effectiveness of detection, and it makes methods that rely on very deep sequencing practical. Over the past year, in collaboration with our partners at the University of Missouri (MU) and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), we started to sequence in earnest: We believe this represents the majority of metagenomic wastewater sequencing produced in the world to date, and it's an incredibly rich dataset. It has allowed us to develop
Linch
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
Remember: There is no such thing as a pink elephant. Recently, I was made aware that my “infohazards small working group” Signal chat, an informal coordination venue where we have frank discussions about infohazards and why it will be bad if specific hazards were leaked to the press or public, accidentally was shared with a deceitful and discredited so-called “journalist,” Kelsey Piper. She is not the first person to have been accidentally sent sensitive material from our group chat, however she is the first to have threatened to go public about the leak. Needless to say, mistakes were made. We’re still trying to figure out the source of this compromise to our secure chat group, however we thought we should give the public a live update to get ahead of the story.  For some context the “infohazards small working group” is a casual discussion venue for the most important, sensitive, and confidential infohazards myself and other philanthropists, researchers, engineers, penetration testers, government employees, and bloggers have discovered over the course of our careers. It is inspired by taxonomies such as professor B******’s typology, and provides an applied lens that has proven helpful for researchers and practitioners the world over.  I am proud of my work in initiating the chat. However, we cannot deny that minor mistakes and setbacks may have been made over the course of attempting to make the infohazards widely accessible and useful to a broad community of people. In particular, the deceitful and discredited journalist may have encountered several new infohazards previously confidential and unleaked: * Mirror nematodes as a solution to mirror bacteria. "Mirror bacteria," synthetic organisms with mirror-image molecules, could pose a significant risk to human health and ecosystems by potentially evading immune defenses and causing untreatable infections. Our scientists have explored engineering mirror nematodes, a natural predator for mirror bacteria, to
Recent opportunities in Community
40
Feedback requested: Financial Independence Purpose Planner tool
Rebecca Herbst
· · 5m read
2
2
16
Sign up for a seminar on Christian Charity: Optimising donation in Christendom
James-Hartree-Law
· · 2m read
0
0
19
Announcement: Animal Charity Evaluators is hosting an AMA on February 17 at 8-10am PT
4 authors
· · 1m read
0
0
View more