Regarding Gratipay Effective Altruism and .impact and Skillshare Effective Altruism which are networks of EA’s exchanging resources, it would be desirable to have them appear in the forum’s initial page. In the same way that Lesswrong currently opens a page with many choices on it.
Gratipay is about donating and receiving donations from other EA’s. It is a direct channel of donation, which avoids institutional costs of donating through an EA institution, and makes sure that even if only one donor and one project builder want to work on a cause, it still gets done.
Skillshare is about donating time and ability between EA’s, offer skills there, and request for help from those who have the skills you need.
and
.impact is about projects. Creating projects, reframing projects, looking for other collaborators. It’s the EA equivalent of an incubator.
Seems clear to me that all of these are important and distinct part of the EA life, and they should all be one click away from the initial EA page.
We are planning some integration, as peter says. Expect a thread that relies on the ea hub in the next few days.
Yes, we should link more EA projects and organisations. It’s just a question of which projects, and where to add the links. I think I’ll start by adding a page full of links to the Introduction to Effective Altruism. For the homepage, it’s important to keep a simple UI. (Some people found LessWrong’s main page to be difficult to penetrate.) Currently, there are just two links for people to “Get Started”, which I’m content with:
The Effective Altruism landing page: this links to lots of projects, like GiveWell and AMF. It’s getting a glossy redesign, which Kerry Vaughan is involved with
The Introduction to Effective Altruism: on-site reading materials.
If I was going to add external links on the frontpage, although some people think that Skillshare and Gratipay have potential, from a coldly objective point of view, there’s little evidence that they will realise it. In the past three months, no new skills or requests have been submitted to Skillshare. Gratipay is doing relatively well with over $100 of weekly donations, although it’s still early days. If we were adding outbound links in the sidebar, the first might be GiveWell or LessWrong.
Some of us could collaborate on writing our own introductions to various parts of effective altruism, and linking articles in that fashion to newcomers as they start asking question. Such a task will be much easier using this forum than it would have been using only the Facebook group before, because we won’t have to repeatedly write responses.
Yes, I think this is very valuable. Whether we write them here, on the Effective Altruism Wiki, or on the LessWrong wiki, I think we should be banking up some introductions to key ideas in effective altruism. The advantage of putting the introductions here is that they will receive criticism but the disadvantage is that the edit history is not recorded in the same way that it would be for a wiki.
If I myself end up writing some introductions, I was thinking on writing them on the existing effective altruism wiki, which isn’t going anywhere. From there, we can port them to another source, or still link them from this site.
That seems the reverse of what is logical. Both Gratipay and Skillshare have frequency dependent value. If people visit them frequently enough, they become valuable resources.
They are mutual-knowledge dependent technologies.
Which is exactly why, if this forum ends up being the conventional place EA’s go to explore what’s new, that is where the link for them should be.
Lesswrong and Givewell, in contrast, are both well established in these regards. Lesswrong already is a conventional place for many to go in search for news. Givewell actually is not frequency dependent.
So your argument (that they have not been much used in the last three months) is actually the reason why they should be given prominence.
Regarding Gratipay Effective Altruism and .impact and Skillshare Effective Altruism which are networks of EA’s exchanging resources, it would be desirable to have them appear in the forum’s initial page. In the same way that Lesswrong currently opens a page with many choices on it.
Gratipay is about donating and receiving donations from other EA’s. It is a direct channel of donation, which avoids institutional costs of donating through an EA institution, and makes sure that even if only one donor and one project builder want to work on a cause, it still gets done.
Skillshare is about donating time and ability between EA’s, offer skills there, and request for help from those who have the skills you need.
and .impact is about projects. Creating projects, reframing projects, looking for other collaborators. It’s the EA equivalent of an incubator.
Seems clear to me that all of these are important and distinct part of the EA life, and they should all be one click away from the initial EA page.
We are planning some integration, as peter says. Expect a thread that relies on the ea hub in the next few days.
Yes, we should link more EA projects and organisations. It’s just a question of which projects, and where to add the links. I think I’ll start by adding a page full of links to the Introduction to Effective Altruism. For the homepage, it’s important to keep a simple UI. (Some people found LessWrong’s main page to be difficult to penetrate.) Currently, there are just two links for people to “Get Started”, which I’m content with:
The Effective Altruism landing page: this links to lots of projects, like GiveWell and AMF. It’s getting a glossy redesign, which Kerry Vaughan is involved with
The Introduction to Effective Altruism: on-site reading materials.
If I was going to add external links on the frontpage, although some people think that Skillshare and Gratipay have potential, from a coldly objective point of view, there’s little evidence that they will realise it. In the past three months, no new skills or requests have been submitted to Skillshare. Gratipay is doing relatively well with over $100 of weekly donations, although it’s still early days. If we were adding outbound links in the sidebar, the first might be GiveWell or LessWrong.
Some of us could collaborate on writing our own introductions to various parts of effective altruism, and linking articles in that fashion to newcomers as they start asking question. Such a task will be much easier using this forum than it would have been using only the Facebook group before, because we won’t have to repeatedly write responses.
Yes, I think this is very valuable. Whether we write them here, on the Effective Altruism Wiki, or on the LessWrong wiki, I think we should be banking up some introductions to key ideas in effective altruism. The advantage of putting the introductions here is that they will receive criticism but the disadvantage is that the edit history is not recorded in the same way that it would be for a wiki.
If I myself end up writing some introductions, I was thinking on writing them on the existing effective altruism wiki, which isn’t going anywhere. From there, we can port them to another source, or still link them from this site.
That seems the reverse of what is logical. Both Gratipay and Skillshare have frequency dependent value. If people visit them frequently enough, they become valuable resources. They are mutual-knowledge dependent technologies.
Which is exactly why, if this forum ends up being the conventional place EA’s go to explore what’s new, that is where the link for them should be.
Lesswrong and Givewell, in contrast, are both well established in these regards. Lesswrong already is a conventional place for many to go in search for news. Givewell actually is not frequency dependent.
So your argument (that they have not been much used in the last three months) is actually the reason why they should be given prominence.
Plans for greater integration between this forum and other pages (like Skillshare) are in the works.