How would a Manifold-centric grantmaking program look?

Flow

• Robin has an idea for a cool Manifold tournament on predicting econ papers
  • But wants someone to cover the mana for markets, prize pool, and organizer’s time. Total cost: $2000 USD
• They create a grant application that’s an impact cert/futures market
• Anyone can put in mana towards making it happen, kickstarter-style
  • Manifold itself might put up $1000 USD of seed funding/cert purchase
  • Once they reach the minimum threshold, the project is underway!
• Later: Robin’s tournament goes viral on Twitter and brings in 1000 new users
  • Manifold pays a retroactive bounty of $5000 to the participants, distributed to shareholders

Use Cases

• Could be mana for setting up markets
• Could be payments/investments to work on something (eg a bug fix)
• Could be funding a essays, diagrams, videos, podcasts on explaining prediction markets
• Could just be cool projects that are willing to embed a market or be sponsored by Manifold

Questions

• How manifold-centric vs “just fund good things” should this be?
  • Manifold-centric: directly useful, easier to judge
  • Funding good things: More existing projects, possibly better virality
• How much money would this cost?
  • Austin thinks 50k of retro funding would work

Notes

• Could be granted by anyone with mana, decentralized granting
  • Decentralized impact purchasing
• Difference vs bounties?
  • Bounties are "granter wants to see this", grants are "I want to do this”
• Important components:
  • Grantmaker can cash out mana for work, or prize pools, etc