I think this topic is very important and your question prompts are great, and agree that wider community could maybe do more. I’m skeptical that much progress can be made via online community discussion.
This topic involves are sensitive, complicated and often there won’t be a obviously right answer (especially around norms).
My guess is that a dedicated person or small team would be needed to collect experiences (whether via surveys, interviews etc), consult with experts on best practices and then get buy in from relevant stakeholders (e.g ea orgs or groups) and work with them (possibly in a pretty hands on way) to test and implement norm changes.
It seems very important to involve the community at all levels, including the main arena of discussions.
Additionally, delegating important community-affecting processes (and eventually, decisions) to small “expert groups” might actually be one of the mechanisms one could criticise the EA community to be over-reliant on, and that causes some of the problems in the first place.
I also wanted to point out that norm changes might not be entirely what a lot of people have in mind, but rule changes too. An important distinction.
I’m not sure if I agree, but if we suppose you’re right, then I’m interested in thinking through what the bottlenecks are for that person or team existing (if they don’t already), and who might be a good fit for that work.
My educated guess is that the people (I believe) would be best positioned / able to do this kind of work well (and I do think it’s important to have a high bar here) have a lot of other compelling opportunities for impact.
I feel like this is a great post, and we should start a conversation here, e.g., by brainstorming problems and solutions. Stopping a conversation just because someone should actually do it, might not be the best way to go, because what guarantees that someone does? At least with this post, we can see if people actually systematically thought about it and already came up with some solutions that could be useful. I have a few ideas for improving EAGs that I would love to share and get feedback on.
To clarify, I don’t want to stop the conversation, just wanted to flag that I don’t think it would be very productive relative to the effort people might put in engaging , and there may be a small chance the conversation online becomes unproductive because it’s much harder to have conversations in sensitive topics online.
I could be wrong of course—perhaps it’s important for people to see that community members want to start these conversations and care about these topics
I think this topic is very important and your question prompts are great, and agree that wider community could maybe do more. I’m skeptical that much progress can be made via online community discussion.
This topic involves are sensitive, complicated and often there won’t be a obviously right answer (especially around norms).
My guess is that a dedicated person or small team would be needed to collect experiences (whether via surveys, interviews etc), consult with experts on best practices and then get buy in from relevant stakeholders (e.g ea orgs or groups) and work with them (possibly in a pretty hands on way) to test and implement norm changes.
It seems very important to involve the community at all levels, including the main arena of discussions.
Additionally, delegating important community-affecting processes (and eventually, decisions) to small “expert groups” might actually be one of the mechanisms one could criticise the EA community to be over-reliant on, and that causes some of the problems in the first place.
I also wanted to point out that norm changes might not be entirely what a lot of people have in mind, but rule changes too. An important distinction.
I’m not sure if I agree, but if we suppose you’re right, then I’m interested in thinking through what the bottlenecks are for that person or team existing (if they don’t already), and who might be a good fit for that work.
My educated guess is that the people (I believe) would be best positioned / able to do this kind of work well (and I do think it’s important to have a high bar here) have a lot of other compelling opportunities for impact.
I feel like this is a great post, and we should start a conversation here, e.g., by brainstorming problems and solutions. Stopping a conversation just because someone should actually do it, might not be the best way to go, because what guarantees that someone does? At least with this post, we can see if people actually systematically thought about it and already came up with some solutions that could be useful. I have a few ideas for improving EAGs that I would love to share and get feedback on.
To clarify, I don’t want to stop the conversation, just wanted to flag that I don’t think it would be very productive relative to the effort people might put in engaging , and there may be a small chance the conversation online becomes unproductive because it’s much harder to have conversations in sensitive topics online.
I could be wrong of course—perhaps it’s important for people to see that community members want to start these conversations and care about these topics
Thanks Ula! Curious what your ideas about improving EAGs are?