Introducing EA Profiles

We’re excited to announce EA Profiles, a new community platform for effective altruists. There are already hundreds of profiles for you to browse from members of the community such as Peter Singer and Jeff Kaufman, full of interesting information like people’s favoured causes and charities, and the actions they’re taking to make the world a better place. And you can create your own right now!

The Profiles should serve as a virtual “Who’s Who” of EA—a place to see information about those who identify with effective altruism, and share what we’re doing to inspire and motivate others. They enable applications such as a map of EAs and a cause-neutral registry of past and planned donations, which we cover in a separate announcement.

Individual members of the effective altruist community

Your EA Profile provides a natural, standard way to share your identification with the ideas of effective altruism and the ways in which you and people you know can do enormous amounts of good, from spreading these ideas to donating to highly efficient charities. We know that people can be slow or cautious about sharing this, but for familiar reasons think that doing so is highly valuable, spreading and normalising a focus on effectiveness and high impact donations. And making a Profile is a great excuse to do so: you’re sharing this information because we asked for it! You can then point people to it, potentially triggering interesting conversations with friends who might like to hear about the ways they can do the most good.

Many of the Profiles come from answers which people opted to make public in the first annual survey of effective altruists this year (which is still open if you haven’t taken it yet; if you have, you can retroactively make selected answers public in a Profile, from your past donations to your location for the map). Peter Hurford is currently working on analysing the survey results and will share them and the raw data from the survey soon, but for now the EA Profiles provide some of the most interesting results: public information on the inspiring actions that individuals are taking.

If you’re interested in building up this project, or working on other similar projects, consider looking into .impact, a coordinated volunteer force working on potentially high-impact projects like this one.

See also: Introducing an EA Donation Registry