This post has now been updated with new numbers. The summary of changes are detailed in this follow-up post. 

This is an interesting idea, I think your post could be stronger & allow people to evaluate whether they want to participate better if it was more clear on the following points: 

Logistics related: 

• Is "we" referring to Overcome? How is your organization involved in this project? You mention you provide fiscal sponsorship but it might be worth first spelling out who you are, your track record and whether someone would want to work / volunteer for your organization. 
  • You say "We've got 3.5 years of experience running EA mental health projects with volunteers." - what kinds of projects have you run in the past (e.g. aside from those you have posted about in the past year?)
  • What has been the outcome of the experiments that Overcome has launched on the EA Forum in the past year?
• Is there a reason why this position is unpaid? I'd be surprised if there are many people who could spend 150+ hours on an unpaid project over a few months. I'd guess if this idea seems relatively cost-effective (e.g. through a BOTEC) you could likely get a some money to pay someone to figure out if it's worth the time.  
  •  

Intervention related: 

• Why this intervention, as opposed to others? There are a lot of things someone could do to improve mental health in developing countries, it's not clear that going for complex cases is a resource-competitive intervention to focus on (as opposed to guided self help which scales a lot more, even if it may be for simpler cases)
  • If you have a BOTEC or more details on the implementation, it would be good to share those.
• You write: "A substantial minority of Western therapists would happily help them pro bono via Zoom." - is this based on your experience? a study?
• You don't talk a lot about the client-side matching - which seems pretty important for success 
  • Do you already have buy-in from mental health organizations which would provide the supply of clients from the low-income countries? 
  • Have you explored potential barriers in therapist matching e.g. cultural and language barriers? 

I've heard a new anecdote from someone who's actively working on a AI research project who feels less connected to relevant people in their domain to get feedback on it. 

This looks super exciting, I'm keen to see how it goes! I'd love to know more about you evaluated the need for this program, and where you'd expect the majority of roles for this kind of research to be (e.g. grantmaking organizations, charities themselves, other meta organizations?) in the next few years.
 

Update: I'm reaching out to a few people to add in more individual donor data and will be updating the post once i get those numbers. I expect this would 5-10x the numbers for 2012-2016 for individual donors depending on how I count it, which is a significant increase. 

I'll comment here when I've made updates to the charts. 

It would be useful to be able to have a change log add-on that shows up as a banner on the top of a post (and ideally but this might be a bit spammy, notifies people who have read, or maybe upvoted or commented on the post) so that they know when a correction has been made. 

Many people may not go back to a post after reading, or notice the change-log (if the authors even include one) - and the changes can often be really important. 

Quick solution: Have a box where people can add their change log and make it a pinned comment (but only for the purpose of updating / correcting posts) so people know what changes have been made before digging into the comments etc. 

Ideally though it would be a banner at the top of the post (under the title / above the body) 

(Use case: I just learnt I was an order of magnitude off in my recent post on funding flows from 2012-2016, and I'd like it to be really obvious that this is the case / for people to read this with a grain of salt.)

+1 I've found this problem a lot. Also the fuzzy search on the search bar is sometimes too fuzzy (e.g. the opposite problem)

Update: The 2012 numbers don't include your donations, but the 2013 ones do - I've corrected the 2012 numbers. Thanks for the flag!

 

Have the answers to these questions changed over the years ? E.g. how might you have answered them in 2017 or 2015?

Yep that's true! I was originally planning to calculate the operating expenses and backfill the chart but it was time consuming, and it was really hard to find data for GWWC / CEA data more generally (I requested CEA for numbers but they declined to provide historical financial figures)

Let me check on your early donations from you and Julia - there may have been an error in my charts!