I would like to see a visual and possibly interactive map of all organizations and projects related to Effective Altruism, and their relationships including hierarchy, funding, room for funding, members, potential scale/scope of impact with some general metric, etc (suggest other useful attributes, and links to similar maps).
Would this project be worth the investment?
EDIT: By map I mean something like a mind map, not geographical.
Of relevance, Rob Wiblin of CEA has previously listed cause prioritisation organisations, so you could start by talking to him about that.
There is already a list of effective altruists at the effective altruism hub. This can be supplemented with the old 80,000 Hours members list. Any attempt to create an additional master list would have a lot of work to do to convince others that it was not just going to be one additional separate incomplete list.
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.
.impact is a volunteer force of effective altruists which work on projects like this. At some point they were working on a map of all the effective altruists meetups. The map you’re proposing would be different. I want to clarify some things:
all organizations and projects
This might be so broad that it wouldn’t belong all on one chart. This could refer to one of many types of groups:
Charities supported by effective altruists, but aren’t central to effective altruism, per se, such as the Against Malaria Foundation, Give Directly, and Farm Sanctuary.
Getting them involved in such a project might be more difficult because these organizations are committed to their individual goals outside of effective altruism. I imagine for some we could get the data if we made an agreement not to abuse it, to ensure the data’s security, and effective altruists did all the work of visualizing it.
Effective altruist organizations, which tend to do advocacy, or research, such as the Centre for Effective Altruism, Givewell, and the Center for Applied Rationality.
Projects would include informal groups such as .impact, or formal collaborations between two organizations such as the Global Priorities Project. There are frequent temporary collaborations between, e.g., the Center For Applied Rationality, and Leverage Research, that are informal, so I don’t believe they would make it on this map.
For-profit enterprises started by effective altruists with the intent to donate a large portion of the profits, or owners’ salaries, to effective charities. There are definitely a few, though I don’t know much about them, so try asking about them in a separate comment thread.
I would like to see a visual and possibly interactive map of all organizations and projects related to Effective Altruism, and their relationships including hierarchy, funding, room for funding, members, potential scale/scope of impact with some general metric, etc (suggest other useful attributes, and links to similar maps).
Would this project be worth the investment?
EDIT: By map I mean something like a mind map, not geographical.
Of relevance, Rob Wiblin of CEA has previously listed cause prioritisation organisations, so you could start by talking to him about that.
There is already a list of effective altruists at the effective altruism hub. This can be supplemented with the old 80,000 Hours members list. Any attempt to create an additional master list would have a lot of work to do to convince others that it was not just going to be one additional separate incomplete list.
Thanks. This isn’t meant to list all individual EAs, but be an meta-representation of the playing field; see my replies to Evan.
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.
.impact is a volunteer force of effective altruists which work on projects like this. At some point they were working on a map of all the effective altruists meetups. The map you’re proposing would be different. I want to clarify some things:
This might be so broad that it wouldn’t belong all on one chart. This could refer to one of many types of groups:
Charities supported by effective altruists, but aren’t central to effective altruism, per se, such as the Against Malaria Foundation, Give Directly, and Farm Sanctuary.
Getting them involved in such a project might be more difficult because these organizations are committed to their individual goals outside of effective altruism. I imagine for some we could get the data if we made an agreement not to abuse it, to ensure the data’s security, and effective altruists did all the work of visualizing it.
Effective altruist organizations, which tend to do advocacy, or research, such as the Centre for Effective Altruism, Givewell, and the Center for Applied Rationality.
Projects would include informal groups such as .impact, or formal collaborations between two organizations such as the Global Priorities Project. There are frequent temporary collaborations between, e.g., the Center For Applied Rationality, and Leverage Research, that are informal, so I don’t believe they would make it on this map.
For-profit enterprises started by effective altruists with the intent to donate a large portion of the profits, or owners’ salaries, to effective charities. There are definitely a few, though I don’t know much about them, so try asking about them in a separate comment thread.
Right.
My core intention is to help visualize the “playing field” of everything EA-related, to aid with:
Deciding the best meta-charities to fund
Visualizing relationships, and how certain organizations could act as force-multipliers for others
Strategizing co-ordination between orgs and perhaps whether the right people are in the right places