Thanks for sharing! I’ve had the feeling for a while that it would be great if EA managed to make goals/projects/activities of people (/organizations) more transparent to each other. E.g. when I’m working on some EA project, it would be great if other EAs who might be interested in that topic would know about it. Yet there are no good ways that I’m aware of to even share such information. So I certainly like the direction you’re taking here.
I guess one risk would be that, however easy to use the system is, it is still overhead for people to have their projects and goals reflected there. Unless it happens to be their primary/only project management system (which however would be very hard to achieve).
Another risk could be that people use it at first, but don’t stick to it very long, leading to a lot of stale information in the system, making it hard to rely on even for highly engaged people.
I guess you could ask two related questions. Firstly, let’s call it “easy mode”: assuming the network existed as imagined, and most people in EA were in fact using this system as intended—would an additional person that first learns of it start using it in the same productive way?
And secondly, in a more realistic situation where very few people are actively using it, would it then make sense for any single additional person to start using it, share their goals and projects, keep things up to date persistently, probably with quite a bit of overhead on their part because it would happen on top of their actual project management system?
I think it’s great to come up with ideas about e.g. “the best possible version EA Hub” and just see what comes out, even though it’s hard to come up with ideas that would answer both above questions positively. Which is why improving the EA Hub generally seems more promising to me than building any new type of network, as at least you’d be starting with a decent user base and would take away the hurdles of “signing up somewhere” and “being part of multiple EA related social networks”.
So long story short, I quite like your approach and the depth of your mock-up/prototype, and think it could work as inspiration for EA Hub to a degree. Have my doubts that it would be worthwhile actually building something new just to try the concept. Except maybe creating a rough interactive prototype (e.g. paper prototype or “click dummy”), and playing it through with a few EAs, which might be worthwhile to learn more about it.
True, this has to be done through smaller steps like a prototype. It can be implement in many shapes and forms. I am working on such ideas right now. All other points you wrote are valid and, I guess, are solvable. Good to hear the concept is not flawed in fundamental ways. Thanks for your comment.
Thanks for sharing! I’ve had the feeling for a while that it would be great if EA managed to make goals/projects/activities of people (/organizations) more transparent to each other. E.g. when I’m working on some EA project, it would be great if other EAs who might be interested in that topic would know about it. Yet there are no good ways that I’m aware of to even share such information. So I certainly like the direction you’re taking here.
I guess one risk would be that, however easy to use the system is, it is still overhead for people to have their projects and goals reflected there. Unless it happens to be their primary/only project management system (which however would be very hard to achieve).
Another risk could be that people use it at first, but don’t stick to it very long, leading to a lot of stale information in the system, making it hard to rely on even for highly engaged people.
I guess you could ask two related questions. Firstly, let’s call it “easy mode”: assuming the network existed as imagined, and most people in EA were in fact using this system as intended—would an additional person that first learns of it start using it in the same productive way?
And secondly, in a more realistic situation where very few people are actively using it, would it then make sense for any single additional person to start using it, share their goals and projects, keep things up to date persistently, probably with quite a bit of overhead on their part because it would happen on top of their actual project management system?
I think it’s great to come up with ideas about e.g. “the best possible version EA Hub” and just see what comes out, even though it’s hard to come up with ideas that would answer both above questions positively. Which is why improving the EA Hub generally seems more promising to me than building any new type of network, as at least you’d be starting with a decent user base and would take away the hurdles of “signing up somewhere” and “being part of multiple EA related social networks”.
So long story short, I quite like your approach and the depth of your mock-up/prototype, and think it could work as inspiration for EA Hub to a degree. Have my doubts that it would be worthwhile actually building something new just to try the concept. Except maybe creating a rough interactive prototype (e.g. paper prototype or “click dummy”), and playing it through with a few EAs, which might be worthwhile to learn more about it.
True, this has to be done through smaller steps like a prototype. It can be implement in many shapes and forms. I am working on such ideas right now. All other points you wrote are valid and, I guess, are solvable. Good to hear the concept is not flawed in fundamental ways. Thanks for your comment.