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At the end of each year Stack Exchange donates money to a few organizations.

This year 433 moderators chose from 5 organizations to donate to. So someone made the list of those 5 possibilities.

I am curious how the pre-defined list of organizations for the donations is made.

And since I would have predefined a totally different list I would suggest the possibility to vote on the list like it is already done for advertisments of Open Source projects.

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    I'd donate all my money to waffle factories.
    – user146787
    Commented Dec 26, 2014 at 14:00
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    It would probably be much more practical to just let the various mods suggest their own organizations and require each to be seconded. You're not going to get more than a few dozen suggestions that way at most, while opening it up to the community would be much broader.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Commented Nov 26, 2016 at 23:53
  • Old post but my two cents: I'd donate to the Users Who Care Too Much about Rep and Trivial Things Foundation.
    – NZKshatriya
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 5:55

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Someone at Stack Exchange -- I believe it's the team of Community Managers, but that's anecdotal -- chooses the list, and then moderators vote on the distribution (once per moderator, not once per diamond).

It's Stack Exchange's money, so this seems perfectly reasonable to me. They don't have to do this at all, or if they do it they don't have to allow any input, but they offer the moderators a vote as thanks for the mods' volunteer efforts. I don't think there would be much benefit (and maybe not much change in the results) if they took on the larger task of putting it up for a vote by the whole user community. I'm happy they do this at all and don't think we need to make it more complex.

The difference between this and the ads for open-source projects is that the latter have some visible effect on the user community, so it makes more sense to involve the community.

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    Good point. I totally agree that it is their money and they can spent it as they like. I just think it would be some kind of improvement if the moderators or the community can choose the list. Nothing wrong if they don't like the idea.
    – juergen d
    Commented Dec 26, 2014 at 19:32

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