Jonathan Courtney of Giving What We Can is who I consider the best person to contact about this.
For getting information
I want to work with Tom Ash to integrate Skillshare into the Effective Altruism Hub, build for it a survey which gets coverage of people’s skills and expertise, and then imports those answers directly into their profiles on the EA Hub for them. From there, people can contact each other directly, which is already a component of the EA Hub. The next step, so people seeking info on the EA Hub could find other effective altruists to help them with a specific task more easily, would be to add a search function to the EA Hub. I know less about how this would be done, but this is my outline for the order in which things would be done. At some point in this process, there would need to be a concerted and strategic push to get as many skilled persons as possible to fill out and complete their profiles on the EA Hub. That way, the EA Hub would serve as a cross between Facebook and LinkedIn, except only spefically for effective altruists all over the world. I just started the conversation with .impact last week, so none of these projects have started yet, but we’re working on it.
Something I could get up much quicker is rebooting the EA Buddy System, which is a system whereby effective altruists could contact each other over Skype or email when they don’t feel connected to the community, and want to integrate more with someone relatable. Giles Edkins founded the EA Buddy System in 2014, but the project languished as he, I, and a couple other volunteers failed to coordinate, or just didn’t have the spare time. Launching it again should be easy, as I know how to do it all, and the main bottleneck would be finding more volunteers across various characteristic dimensions such as professional sector of work, prioritized EA cause, timezone (for ease of scheduling, e.g., Skyp calls), geographic location, and other demographic dimensions. I can have a post explaining all this, rebooting it, and seeking volunteers within 24 hours.
Giles Edkins led the Buddy System before, but when I contacted him about it via Facebook about one month ago, he didn’t respond. I’m assuming he’s indisposed for time, by being busy with other EA projects (which I know he works on lots) and his job and personal life and whatnot. Until I hear back from him, I’ll assume leadership of rebooting the EA Buddy System. I have new design ideas for it anyway. I’ll get on it now I know there’s demand from others.
Conclusion: I drafted this comments before I even reading your post. We’ve independently converged on all the same ideas. Awesome. Let’s get organized to get all these started.
Integrating Skillshare and the EA Hub sounds exciting! Most of the comments so far have focused on connecting newcomers—this one could solve the expertise problem.
I’ve also heard of a ‘EA Nexus’ project in the pre-planning phase that aims to solve roughly the same issues. If you haven’t already, you can contact Roxanne Heston or Oliver Habryka about this.
I endorse rebooting the buddy system as well! How can we make it so that new people will actually find it? Giles helped me on Slack with this post, you can probably reach him there. I also think that framing the system more in terms of “help me get connected” or “connect me to someone to talk about...” rather than “I’m stuck, I need a buddy” would make more people want to use it.
I was talking to Tom on Facebook, and apparently connecting Skillsahre with EA Hub, and also implementing a search function into the Hub, are projects underway. I’m guessing whatever designs they intend to implement are better than me starting a design from scratch, so I’ll help out with what’s already happening. I’ll talk to Roxane and Oliver for the reasons cited above, as well as to address my own concern that the EA Hub, and the EAG/EA-Outreach team making two different websites which serve the same purpose might be confusing and divide the EA community in half in terms of what online resources they think they’re supposed to use. Maybe we can all work together. Delegation might get difficult soon, as the number of people involved is likely approaching ten, a big nubmer, and we’re not all on the same page, if we include the EA Outreach team in all this. Starting the design of online tools soon instead of more discussion seems a good idea.
Jonathan Courtney of Giving What We Can is who I consider the best person to contact about this.
I want to work with Tom Ash to integrate Skillshare into the Effective Altruism Hub, build for it a survey which gets coverage of people’s skills and expertise, and then imports those answers directly into their profiles on the EA Hub for them. From there, people can contact each other directly, which is already a component of the EA Hub. The next step, so people seeking info on the EA Hub could find other effective altruists to help them with a specific task more easily, would be to add a search function to the EA Hub. I know less about how this would be done, but this is my outline for the order in which things would be done. At some point in this process, there would need to be a concerted and strategic push to get as many skilled persons as possible to fill out and complete their profiles on the EA Hub. That way, the EA Hub would serve as a cross between Facebook and LinkedIn, except only spefically for effective altruists all over the world. I just started the conversation with .impact last week, so none of these projects have started yet, but we’re working on it.
Something I could get up much quicker is rebooting the EA Buddy System, which is a system whereby effective altruists could contact each other over Skype or email when they don’t feel connected to the community, and want to integrate more with someone relatable. Giles Edkins founded the EA Buddy System in 2014, but the project languished as he, I, and a couple other volunteers failed to coordinate, or just didn’t have the spare time. Launching it again should be easy, as I know how to do it all, and the main bottleneck would be finding more volunteers across various characteristic dimensions such as professional sector of work, prioritized EA cause, timezone (for ease of scheduling, e.g., Skyp calls), geographic location, and other demographic dimensions. I can have a post explaining all this, rebooting it, and seeking volunteers within 24 hours.
Giles Edkins led the Buddy System before, but when I contacted him about it via Facebook about one month ago, he didn’t respond. I’m assuming he’s indisposed for time, by being busy with other EA projects (which I know he works on lots) and his job and personal life and whatnot. Until I hear back from him, I’ll assume leadership of rebooting the EA Buddy System. I have new design ideas for it anyway. I’ll get on it now I know there’s demand from others.
Conclusion: I drafted this comments before I even reading your post. We’ve independently converged on all the same ideas. Awesome. Let’s get organized to get all these started.
Integrating Skillshare and the EA Hub sounds exciting! Most of the comments so far have focused on connecting newcomers—this one could solve the expertise problem.
I’ve also heard of a ‘EA Nexus’ project in the pre-planning phase that aims to solve roughly the same issues. If you haven’t already, you can contact Roxanne Heston or Oliver Habryka about this.
I endorse rebooting the buddy system as well! How can we make it so that new people will actually find it? Giles helped me on Slack with this post, you can probably reach him there. I also think that framing the system more in terms of “help me get connected” or “connect me to someone to talk about...” rather than “I’m stuck, I need a buddy” would make more people want to use it.
I was talking to Tom on Facebook, and apparently connecting Skillsahre with EA Hub, and also implementing a search function into the Hub, are projects underway. I’m guessing whatever designs they intend to implement are better than me starting a design from scratch, so I’ll help out with what’s already happening. I’ll talk to Roxane and Oliver for the reasons cited above, as well as to address my own concern that the EA Hub, and the EAG/EA-Outreach team making two different websites which serve the same purpose might be confusing and divide the EA community in half in terms of what online resources they think they’re supposed to use. Maybe we can all work together. Delegation might get difficult soon, as the number of people involved is likely approaching ten, a big nubmer, and we’re not all on the same page, if we include the EA Outreach team in all this. Starting the design of online tools soon instead of more discussion seems a good idea.