I agree with all of Shawn’s points, and would add that it’s not just about expertise: even creating the documents, getting feedback, etc seems like it might be beyond our capacity at this point.
The original ZF grants system had a notion of “community requests” and I think this makes a lot of sense. That is, if others could write the RFP, we could decide whether or not to fund it as if it were a grant, and then it would sit there until someone applied for it.
If it turns out that we don’t tend to get enough applicants to make discussing and pre-approving RFPs worth it, then we could only consider the RFP once someone has expressed willingness to work on it—i.e. do what we’d do in a normal grant situation: wait for the application.
I think we should try it out in this case! Would someone like to write up the RFP?