Probably, yes :-)
This is very much an experiment. We think it's a pretty good one to
trial-and-error with, because 1., Brianna Laugher, the volunteer, is
highly trusted and effective; 2., Philip Greenspun, the donor, is
sympathetic to our goals generally, and open to experimenting with us.
He's also one person rather than an institution, which will make it
fairly easy for us all to refine/finetune as we go. And 3., this is a
large enough amount of money to make the project worthwhile on its own
merits, but not so very large that we are locked in to something for a
long period of time, if it turns out that it doesn't work very well.
We're really grateful to Philip for being willing to try it out.
One goal here is simply to get more good illustrations into the projects
- that's a worthy end result, obviously, in & of itself. But we're also
aiming to see if the general idea -funneling restricted donations to
community members for execution- is workable. To the extent that it does
work, it could be very powerful.
100% agree. This seems like an excellent opportunity to work out how
to implement schemes like this. If it turns out we can do it quite
easily, then we can do more of them, possibly larger ones, possibly
smaller ones. If it doesn't work, we know not to waste time in future.
I just want to be sure people aren't assuming this will be easy - it
may well not be, and we certainly don't want to jump in head first
without thinking everything through.