open allocation infrastructure, for humans and for agents.
The largest pool of liquid altruistic capital in modern history is about to land. Increasingly it will be moved not only by people, but by agents acting on their behalf — recommending, scoring, negotiating, and allocating at a volume the existing institutions were never built to absorb.
Orchestrating that needs an allocation layer that is open and shared — so that many funders, recommenders, and applicants, and the agents working for each, can coordinate without routing everything through a single operator.
As more of the grantmaking loop is done by agents, the allocation layer stops being a spreadsheet inside one foundation and becomes a protocol many parties can run, inspect, and compose. Phil is a set of small public-goods funding mechanisms, each explorable in the browser and early enough to argue with.
Why this, why now: the manifesto.
All of these are works in progress: sketches, simulations, and reference implementations for allocation mechanisms worth making more legible.