I did my first ever grant last month for ~5.7k in llm credits and here are the lessons I learnt:
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Make sure to record the emails for the people who apply for the award. I set up the Google form in the default setting and did not check the response format before opening the grant to everybody and unfortunately this meant that the first 33 of 85 applicants were not associated with emails, so I could not follow up with them.
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I did not say whether or not I would be contacting only winners or all applicants in the application, which is another error on my behalf.
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The summary here is that you need to consider both the application phase and the awarding phase, I did not consider the latter, and I believe other first-time granters may run into this issue.
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I gave the grant criteria and applications to Gemini to pick the winners, which I believe is less biased than me choosing, but I also feel that it’s not fair that I didn’t read each application.
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One thing I am happy with is that I intentionally made the application short with just one option to select the llm provider and then a 2-3 sentence response, so as to minimally consume the time of applicants.