Open Philanthropy donations made to Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment

This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

Basic donor information

ItemValue
Country United States
Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions)GiveWell Good Ventures
Best overview URLhttps://causeprioritization.org/Open%20Philanthropy%20Project
Facebook username openphilanthropy
Websitehttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/
Donations URLhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants
Twitter usernameopen_phil
PredictionBook usernameOpenPhilUnofficial
Page on philosophy informing donationshttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/vision-and-values
Grant application process pagehttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers
Regularity with which donor updates donations datacontinuous updates
Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)continuous updates
Lag with which donor updates donations datamonths
Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)days
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Open+Philanthropy

Brief history: Open Philanthropy (Open Phil for short) spun off from GiveWell, starting as GiveWell Labs in 2011, beginning to make strong progress in 2013, and formally separating from GiveWell as the "Open Philanthropy Project" in June 2017. In 2020, it started going by "Open Philanthropy" dropping the "Project" word.

Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: Open Philanthropy is focused on openness in two ways: open to ideas about cause selection, and open in explaining what they are doing. It has endorsed "hits-based giving" and is working on areas of AI risk, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and other global catastrophic risks, criminal justice reform (United States), animal welfare, and some other areas.

Notes on grant decision logistics: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-grantmaking-so-far-approach-and-process for the general grantmaking process and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/questions-we-ask-ourselves-making-grant for more questions that grant investigators are encouraged to consider. Every grant has a grant investigator that we call the influencer here on Donations List Website; for focus areas that have Program Officers, the grant investigator is usually the Program Officer. The grant investigator has been included in grants published since around July 2017. Grants usually need approval from an executive; however, some grant investigators have leeway to make "discretionary grants" where the approval process is short-circuited; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/discretionary-grants for more. Note that the term "discretionary grant" means something different for them compared to government agencies, see https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10213483361534364 for more.

Notes on grant publication logistics: Every publicly disclosed grant has a writeup published at the time of public disclosure, but the writeups vary significantly in length. Grant writeups are usually written by somebody other than the grant investigator, but approved by the grant investigator as well as the grantee. Grants have three dates associated with them: an internal grant decision date (that is not publicly revealed but is used in some statistics on total grant amounts decided by year), a grant date (which we call donation date; this is the date of the formal grant commitment, which is the published grant date), and a grant announcement date (which we call donation announcement date; the date the grant is announced to the mailing list and the grant page made publicly visible). Lags are a few months between decision and grant, and a few months between grant and announcement, due to time spent with grant writeup approval.

Notes on grant financing: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers or https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/who-we-are for more information. Grants generally come from the Open Philanthropy Fund, a donor-advised fund managed by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, with most of its money coming from Good Ventures. Some grants are made directly by Good Ventures, and political grants may be made by the Open Philanthropy Action Fund. At least one grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/criminal-justice-reform/working-families-party-prosecutor-reforms-new-york was made by Cari Tuna personally. The majority of grants are financed by the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; however, the source of financing of a grant is not always explicitly specified, so it cannot be confidently assumed that a grant with no explicit listed financing is financed through the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; see the comment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Funding for multi-year grants is usually disbursed annually, and the amounts are often equal across years, but not always. The fact that a grant is multi-year, or the distribution of the grant amount across years, are not always explicitly stated on the grant page; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Some grants to universities are labeled "gifts" but this is a donee classification, based on different levels of bureaucratic overhead and funder control between grants and gifts; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information.

Miscellaneous notes: Most GiveWell-recommended grants made by Good Ventures and listed in the Open Philanthropy database are not listed on Donations List Website as being under Open Philanthropy. Specifically, GiveWell Incubation Grants are not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=GiveWell+Incubation+Grants with donor GiveWell Incubation Grants), and grants made by Good Ventures to GiveWell top and standout charities are also not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+top+and+standout+charities with donor Good Ventures/GiveWell top and standout charities). Grants to support GiveWell operations are not included here; they can be found at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+support with donor "Good Ventures/GiveWell support".The investment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/impossible-foods in Impossible Foods is not included because it does not fit our criteria for a donation, and also because no amount was included. All other grants publicly disclosed by open philanthropy that are not GiveWell Incubation Grants or GiveWell top and standout charity grants should be included. Grants disclosed by grantees but not yet disclosed by Open Philanthropy are not included; some of them may be listed at https://issarice.com/open-philanthropy-project-non-grant-funding

Full donor page for donor Open Philanthropy

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country

Full donee page for donee Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 1 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234
Climate change 1 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234 76,234

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Cause area Number of donations Total 2016
Climate change (filter this donor) 1 76,234.00 76,234.00
Total 1 76,234.00 76,234.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (0 documents)

There are no documents associated with this combination of donor and donee.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (1 donations)

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 1)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
76,234.0012016-05Climate change/geoengineering/solar radiation managementhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/miscellaneous/american-university-forum-climate-engineering-assessment-- Donation process: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/miscellaneous/american-university-forum-climate-engineering-assessment#Our_process says: "We first had contact with FCEA in mid-2015, while working on our shallow investigation of SRMGI. Dr. Nicholson approached us in early 2016 to ask us to consider funding this convening." https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/FCEA/Open_Philanthropy_LOI.pdf has the letter of inquiry, though that letter is about the first convening in March 2016, whereas the eventual funding is for the third convening in early 2017.

Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses

Intended use of funds: The grant page says: "This grant is intended to fund a third meeting, which FCEA plans to hold in early 2017." https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/miscellaneous/american-university-forum-climate-engineering-assessment#Proposed_activities says: "FCEA plans for its 2017 working group meeting to focus on discovering potential lessons from the governance of other emerging technologies that could be applied to climate engineering. Dr. Simon Nicholson (FCEA’s Co-Executive Director) told us that the main fields that FCEA would like to have represented at the conference are biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and nanotechnology." The budget https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/FCEA/Open_Philanthropy_Budget_FINAL_redacted.xlsx provides a spending breakdown for the second convening in September 2016, even though the grant is for the third convening in early 2017.

Donor reason for selecting the donee: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/miscellaneous/american-university-forum-climate-engineering-assessment#Goals_for_the_grant says: "One role that we believe philanthropy is particularly well-suited to play is helping to position groups and individuals to examine problems and discuss potential solutions before those problems become urgent. We hope that this FCEA convening will serve as part of a gradual process by which discussing and considering climate engineering becomes more accepted, making it more likely that the global community will have an in-depth understanding of technological options and risks in the event that climate engineering is seriously considered as an approach to reducing harms from climate change at some point in the future. In concrete terms, we hope to support a well-run conference on the topic of governance of emerging technologies. We hope that FCEA will share any ideas or conclusions that the conference produces in some form."

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The budget https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/FCEA/Open_Philanthropy_Budget_FINAL_redacted.xlsx provides a breakdown of expected spending for the second convening in September 2016, even though the grant is for the third convening in early 2017. The implicit assumption sees to be that the expected spending will be roughly similar.

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/miscellaneous/american-university-forum-climate-engineering-assessment#Our_process suggests that the timing is determined by the timing of Open Philanthropy being reached out to for funding the conference: "Dr. Nicholson approached us in early 2016 to ask us to consider funding this convening." https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/FCEA/Open_Philanthropy_LOI.pdf has the letter of inquiry.
Intended funding timeframe in months: 1

Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/miscellaneous/american-university-forum-climate-engineering-assessment#Follow-up_expectations says: "We expect to have a conversation with FCEA staff after the 2017 conference, with public notes if the conversation warrants it. We also plan to attempt a more holistic and detailed evaluation of the grant’s performance (based in part on our own impressions of the conference, if we are able to attend)."

Donor retrospective of the donation: Notes from a followup conversation https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Conversations/Simon_Nicholson_03-10-17_(public).pdf (2017-03-10) are available.

Other notes: Grant made via American University. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/miscellaneous/american-university-forum-climate-engineering-assessment#Risks_and_reservations lists risks and reservations, including technological lock-in into geoengineering even if it may be harmful, and distraction from other climate change mitigation efforts. Announced: 2016-05-27.