Some parts of this project seem worth the investment, but not all of them, and not all the worthy parts at the same time. Essentially, we could build a map with basic facts at first, and add more to it, making it richer, as the data we’d be looking for becomes more accessible. Here’s my rationale for what’s out:
hierarchy
Effective altruist organizations have tended to have small(er) teams of staff, with only one, or two, executives. A link from the map to the staff page of an organization’s website would suffice for transparency, since there are so few levels of hierarchy in the first place.
members
Some effective altruist organizations have a membership base numbering in the hundreds, such as 80,000 Hours, The Life You Can Save, and the Center for Applied Rationality. So, listing all the members would be impractical. Also, I believe it would be too difficult to negotiate getting all the data one might want without betraying the privacy of the users.
Effective altruism is not nearly centralized enough for an official organization to coordinate this. The work would likely fall on .impact, which is already swamped with projects. The good news is that a one or more eager people is all it takes to get the ball rolling by working on their own projects they propose to .impact. The major investment would be time, and personal effort. It might be more difficult to get large sums of money for making this map, but there are some effective altruists who provide minor funds to individual effective altruist projects.
To start off with, I believe the map could be broken down into the four categories of organizations I delineated below, and the map could conceptually show relationships between them. For each organization, we would have a link to their mission statement, or about page, a link to their staff page, a blurb about their major accomplishments, and a blurb about their current work.
Not all effective altruist organizations have optimally organized, or publicly available information about:
funding
room for more funding
potential scale/scope of impact with some general metric, etc.
I would like to see effective altruist organizations publish this sort of material, but coordinating them all to do so would be a separate task from getting that information up on the map.
It’s good you asked this question, because it forced me to think about what’s feasible, and what’s not.
Regarding hierarchy; this was more of a meta-hierarchy of what projects might encompass the scope of others, etc, rather than official associations between the orgs.
I didn’t intend to link every person who identifies as an EA; rather just display which major players work on what projects.
I didn’t envision this as a huge project; I think even just plugging things into a mind map would be nice.
Some parts of this project seem worth the investment, but not all of them, and not all the worthy parts at the same time. Essentially, we could build a map with basic facts at first, and add more to it, making it richer, as the data we’d be looking for becomes more accessible. Here’s my rationale for what’s out:
Effective altruist organizations have tended to have small(er) teams of staff, with only one, or two, executives. A link from the map to the staff page of an organization’s website would suffice for transparency, since there are so few levels of hierarchy in the first place.
Some effective altruist organizations have a membership base numbering in the hundreds, such as 80,000 Hours, The Life You Can Save, and the Center for Applied Rationality. So, listing all the members would be impractical. Also, I believe it would be too difficult to negotiate getting all the data one might want without betraying the privacy of the users.
Effective altruism is not nearly centralized enough for an official organization to coordinate this. The work would likely fall on .impact, which is already swamped with projects. The good news is that a one or more eager people is all it takes to get the ball rolling by working on their own projects they propose to .impact. The major investment would be time, and personal effort. It might be more difficult to get large sums of money for making this map, but there are some effective altruists who provide minor funds to individual effective altruist projects.
To start off with, I believe the map could be broken down into the four categories of organizations I delineated below, and the map could conceptually show relationships between them. For each organization, we would have a link to their mission statement, or about page, a link to their staff page, a blurb about their major accomplishments, and a blurb about their current work.
Not all effective altruist organizations have optimally organized, or publicly available information about:
funding
room for more funding
potential scale/scope of impact with some general metric, etc.
I would like to see effective altruist organizations publish this sort of material, but coordinating them all to do so would be a separate task from getting that information up on the map.
It’s good you asked this question, because it forced me to think about what’s feasible, and what’s not.
Regarding hierarchy; this was more of a meta-hierarchy of what projects might encompass the scope of others, etc, rather than official associations between the orgs.
I didn’t intend to link every person who identifies as an EA; rather just display which major players work on what projects.
I didn’t envision this as a huge project; I think even just plugging things into a mind map would be nice.