Basically, I would just copy the EA Hub if you want to create something useful. For me, the filter system is extremely important. The ability to contact people via LinkedIn (where everyone is), via direct message. I mean one can be using EA Hub for everything: contacting potential mentors, contacting experts in the given area for research purposes, contacting people “open to job offers”, contacting people who can advise you. I mean there is no other place, where we can see what people’s interests are and reach out to them based on that. Let’s look at the filters—maybe I am looking for an editor in the UK time zone—I can filter through “open to job offers”, “interested in communications”, “interested in specific cause area”. I mean isn’t this amazing? Everyone should be there. It’s the easiest way to connect for useful, impactful stuff.
The most impactful thing is that EA Hub is open. I know that different orgs have huge people databases but because they collect their data for the organization, they can’t share it under GDPR. EA Hub, therefore, is extremely important, it allows the connections that are not facilitated anywhere else.
Why you just don’t take over the management of EA Hub if the current team can’t afford to run it any longer? I mean building a similar system will take you ages, no? Like, people are already there. Are you going to ask each person to come to your new system? Are you going to transfer people’s profiles to the new system? As I understand it, it took a very long time (years) to build the EA hub and its functionalities. I can’t imagine you will be able to create a whole, equally useful thing, fast.
I would consider just buying/taking over and promoting creating accounts there. Treating it like LinkedIn for EAs.
You can just create one bigger page like EA community, part of this page will be the forum, part of the page will be EA Hub, and part of the page will be EA Work e.g. If you will have a skilled full-stack developer, they can probably nicely put this stuff together.
It’s very common in the startup world that each new developer hates working on other developers’ code, and says: oh I will better build something new. But it’s very common later for them to underdeliver or take ages. It would be sad if all this work that is already done, and the database of amazing people that signed up, just vanished or was stopped from developing.
Maybe there is a third way to go about it? What do you think?
The EA Forum (and other CEA sites like EA.org) get a lot of traffic. [1] This traffic will naturally make any connection-oriented features more valuable than if they were on a standalone site without as much traffic. (I think this was part of why the Hub team thinks CEA is better placed to develop these features, though I don’t want to speak for them.)
I like the idea of code reuse in general, but if we want to move these features to the Forum, I expect code reuse to not be very helpful. The Hub was written in a different language, uses a different database management system, etc. We could in theory write translators between these different systems, but I expect that to be more complicated than a native implementation.
I am more excited about reusing the “intellectual property” of the Hub. The Hub team has been awesome, sharing their design and research documents etc., and I expect this to be quite helpful in our work.
By the way I was contacted by Ula via LinkedIn in a way that was promoting CE’s opportunities not extensively related to my profile and written in the tone of ‘help us achieve our objectives’ way, which I suggested that is avoided due to the reputational loss risk of limited consideration of supporting persons in pursuing their objectives, quite the opposite (I briefly discussed this with Ula).
Nevertheless, there is a great potential value in the EA Hub database of asks and offers in enabling persons to find others with similar interests or complementary asks-offers. I would even add some fields, to enable more informed search. For example:
Path to impact
Transferrable skills / skill level matrix
Skills interested in developing
Cause area expertise / expertise nature and level matrix
Cause area expertise interested in developing
Originally, this was an idea following up on the Common App post that also included current and past employment information, language skills, logistics preferences, professional profile, organization and role-specific questions and tasks, and engagement preferences. This would be more relevant to job / applicant / colleague / discussant / complementary thinker / volunteer opportunity / feedback or resources sharing etc search.
Basically, I would just copy the EA Hub if you want to create something useful.
For me, the filter system is extremely important. The ability to contact people via LinkedIn (where everyone is), via direct message.
I mean one can be using EA Hub for everything: contacting potential mentors, contacting experts in the given area for research purposes, contacting people “open to job offers”, contacting people who can advise you. I mean there is no other place, where we can see what people’s interests are and reach out to them based on that.
Let’s look at the filters—maybe I am looking for an editor in the UK time zone—I can filter through “open to job offers”, “interested in communications”, “interested in specific cause area”. I mean isn’t this amazing? Everyone should be there. It’s the easiest way to connect for useful, impactful stuff.
The most impactful thing is that EA Hub is open. I know that different orgs have huge people databases but because they collect their data for the organization, they can’t share it under GDPR. EA Hub, therefore, is extremely important, it allows the connections that are not facilitated anywhere else.
Why you just don’t take over the management of EA Hub if the current team can’t afford to run it any longer? I mean building a similar system will take you ages, no? Like, people are already there. Are you going to ask each person to come to your new system? Are you going to transfer people’s profiles to the new system? As I understand it, it took a very long time (years) to build the EA hub and its functionalities. I can’t imagine you will be able to create a whole, equally useful thing, fast.
I would consider just buying/taking over and promoting creating accounts there. Treating it like LinkedIn for EAs.
You can just create one bigger page like EA community, part of this page will be the forum, part of the page will be EA Hub, and part of the page will be EA Work e.g.
If you will have a skilled full-stack developer, they can probably nicely put this stuff together.
It’s very common in the startup world that each new developer hates working on other developers’ code, and says: oh I will better build something new. But it’s very common later for them to underdeliver or take ages. It would be sad if all this work that is already done, and the database of amazing people that signed up, just vanished or was stopped from developing.
Maybe there is a third way to go about it? What do you think?
This is also what I think would be the best option. I like that EA hub and the Forum are two separate things, because they have different functions.
EA hub feels much more friendly to me, probably because of pictures, control over profile visibility, and how the profiles are conceived.
I feel quite intimidated on the Forum because of how serious and public it is.
The EA Forum (and other CEA sites like EA.org) get a lot of traffic. [1] This traffic will naturally make any connection-oriented features more valuable than if they were on a standalone site without as much traffic. (I think this was part of why the Hub team thinks CEA is better placed to develop these features, though I don’t want to speak for them.)
I like the idea of code reuse in general, but if we want to move these features to the Forum, I expect code reuse to not be very helpful. The Hub was written in a different language, uses a different database management system, etc. We could in theory write translators between these different systems, but I expect that to be more complicated than a native implementation.
I am more excited about reusing the “intellectual property” of the Hub. The Hub team has been awesome, sharing their design and research documents etc., and I expect this to be quite helpful in our work.
At least they get a lot of traffic for an EA site. Not a lot relative to something like Google, of course.
By the way I was contacted by Ula via LinkedIn in a way that was promoting CE’s opportunities not extensively related to my profile and written in the tone of ‘help us achieve our objectives’ way, which I suggested that is avoided due to the reputational loss risk of limited consideration of supporting persons in pursuing their objectives, quite the opposite (I briefly discussed this with Ula).
Nevertheless, there is a great potential value in the EA Hub database of asks and offers in enabling persons to find others with similar interests or complementary asks-offers. I would even add some fields, to enable more informed search. For example:
Path to impact
Transferrable skills / skill level matrix
Skills interested in developing
Cause area expertise / expertise nature and level matrix
Cause area expertise interested in developing
Originally, this was an idea following up on the Common App post that also included current and past employment information, language skills, logistics preferences, professional profile, organization and role-specific questions and tasks, and engagement preferences. This would be more relevant to job / applicant / colleague / discussant / complementary thinker / volunteer opportunity / feedback or resources sharing etc search.