Project goals

• primary goal:
  • give away $200,000 such that it does the most possible good
• high-level goals:
  • give the money away sooner rather than later
    • (reasoning: people need it now, and because of the miracle of compound appreciation, more good gets done if you start early)
    • start giving it away this year
    • finish giving it all away in a matter of years, not decades
  • give the money toward the types of interventions that do the most good
    • (reasoning: giving $1,000 to pay for famine relief and giving $1,000 to pay for dance lessons both create value, but the famine relief does more good)
    • study the work of other people who have tried to figure out what does the most good
      • read the book Global Crises, Global Solutions
    • compile a list of cost/benefit numbers for different types of interventions — for example, as a baseline, one claim is that the average cost of saving a human life for one year in the third world is $62
  • give the money to organizations that can use it most effectively
    • (reasoning: two organizations may both be doing very similar AIDS prevention work, but one of them may be doing it twice as effectively as the other — perhaps due to economies of scale, or lower overhead, or a focus on a different region of the world)
    • study the work of other people who have tried to compare the performance of different organizations
      • learn more about the organization ACCESS
    • compile a list of cost/benefit numbers for different organizations
  • try to be fair
    • try not to be influenced by personal connections with people at charities — evaluate organizations as objectively as possible
    • help the people who need it most, without bias based on race, religion, nationality, or sex
  • encourage cultural change in the way organizations work
    • let the candidate organizations know that the donation decisions are based on quantitative criteria and comparative performance, rather than personal relationships or positive impressions
    • give to organizations that are working openly and transparently — for example, using a creative commons license for everything they post to the web — and, posting way more day-to-day content to the web, like lists of employees, and weekly departmental meeting notes, and all of their QuickBooks records
  • be a visible role model
    • work in an open and transparent way, so that other people can find out about the project
    • invite friends to get involved in different ways during the project
    • write up some short summary stuff after the project, and send that to friends or post it on the web
  • finish what you start
    • don't bite off more than you can chew — pick realistic goals
    • borrow some ideas from extreme programming and agile development — produce a simple solution quickly, and then iteratively add value to it
    • stay motivated — invite friends to get involved and share enthusiasm for the project — maybe: recruit a board of advisors to monitor progress? — maybe: arrange to cede philanthropic control over some portion of the funds for each milestone that I miss?