Mothspace

In this current climate of fluctuating economic forces and changing institutions, we believe that there is a type of investment that is disproportionately impactful, in aggregate and per dollar invested, to the flourishing of ecosystems around the country.

One observation of ours is that people who are motivated to invent and research tend to find “some way to make life work.” For example, if they are stuck with a bad boss, they suffer, sometimes for a long time, but eventually through help or the chains of cause and effect that come from unsustainability, they go on to do something different.

An outside observer may see this and conclude that productive people are “always working on something,” or are “unhireable” absent a large incentive that is larger than their incentives for their current projects. Given that productive people can be seen as making informed choices around where they should live, who they should be working with, and what they should be working on, the sorts of entities that might feel confident enough to make a bid for a “poach” are either already of a large size, or are startups hoping to become a entity of a large size.

What gets lost in the “some way to make life work” trail of projects are the projects that had to be abandoned in order to “make life work.” An example of this would be a person who had intrinsic motivation and thought something was important enough to work on it for three years while working a job that was not very demanding, and then having a need to take a more demanding job that pays more. The project that was seen as intrinsically important is thus abandoned. However, this project may not ever show up on a resume line, and there would not be gaps on the resume that would suggest that a private project potentially even existed.

We believe that given the motivations for project attrition, that what is needed to keep these kinds of projects going is less than the price of one competent software engineer salary, or one attorney salary.

Here at Mothspace, we keep track of projects that we think are interesting and productive that would benefit from a donation of less than $107,500. For some projects, this may be the amount of resources that is needed to take the project to completion. For other projects, this may be the amount of resources that is needed for further development and research, to understand what about the project is possible, can be completed, or to carefully architect a blueprint for what would be needed for it to be completed.

These projects are partially vetted. We believe that these projects are likely productive and likely to make the world better — but we have not ourselves checked every detail for feasibility of execution. That itself would require an enormous amount of work. However, we do have people who would be happy to talk to you about the projects, join you on calls with people from a project, or help you consider a donation.

Here is the running list of existing projects: