“Internally, the usual suspects among services are typical, such as Google Workspace for email and shared files, Calendly and Zoom for planning and holding meetings, etc.”
“There seems to be an extensive reliance on the big players that have been around for a long time”
“system-level thinking about the technological platform”
“At the end of this phase, I hope there will be very little doubt that this is a successful model”
Hey, it would be good to confirm the attitudes in this post with users and people with experience, like talented developers and project managers, and by bring up specific use cases.
Like, I think I know someone who has spent time with a few executive directors and people with chief in their title or something.
Over the decades, these people see a large supply of meta advice, and this meta advice is of varying quality.
One realm of this kind of advice is in tech, and one subset is “use [my] [website/app/platform/framework] because [this other thing is a dinosaur] and [all the cool people are using it]”.
The downside of following advice is that people can be lead down the garden path, and distract and suck up time.
When new technologies are pushed without a specific explanation of usefulness, I think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
I don’t think the solution is to set our “information cascade parameter” to maximum or choose the modal platform and get EA a Salesforce rep or something.
Maybe we can hear from a number of people in the community with good instincts and experience.
To be “inside model” or something, and talk on a pretty narrow set of claims concretely:
I know someone who built a few websites with Wordpress and also uses much cooler, no code apps (and there’s a fair supply of these apps nowadays).
Yeah, Wordpress has been around a long time, and I’m sure it’s clunky. But it also has a large marketplace of help that is available. Also, this person wasn’t an expert and built a WordPress site in about 15 hours, and it looks better than CEA or Open Phil.
In almost all cases, it’s running on some popular website builder such as Squarespace or Wix or WordPress at a regular web hosting company. The upside of these ready-made solutions is mainly that anyone can use them, edit pages, add content, connect them to other services etc. The downside is that they are often highly rigid in what they allow, for example, a web developer to do, which is also a common point of struggle: Organisations outgrow their ready-made website and want to add features that are difficult, or even impossible, to add without access to the backend or the ability to write custom code.
Ok, so this gives the impression that WordPress is for starter websites. While it’s easy to use, it’s pretty limited. It is a tool that a sophisticated org should outgrow.
The point of the post is to be mostly descriptive. I don’t see where you get the idea I’m trying to push any particular tech. I have not advised anyone to replace their web platform unless they have explicitly asked for it, and I think WordPress is an excellent choice. Using website builders is and has always been, a trade-off between user convenience and developer convenience, and if you work in this industry you know this. I think you’re reading far too much into what I’m reporting here. Also, I’ve worked as a full-stack web developer for 15+ years, at larger companies, startups, web agencies, and as a freelancer.
To clarify what I mean by system-level thinking:
Instead of thinking of every EA org as an isolated entity with isolated needs, I think of all of them as a collective. There is technical knowledge to be transferred between them and improvements that can be made to all organisations at once. For example, several organisations I’ve talked to have an interest in creating a job board, or improving the one they have. At the same time, I have also talked to 80,000 Hours about their plans for their job board and the fact they are hiring a director to run that specific project. This tells me there’s an opportunity for them to expand the functionality of their job board to a point where several of the other organisations don’t need one of their own. Maybe creating job boards for smaller organisations shouldn’t be a priority until it’s clear what’s happening with this popular, already existent job board.
I just think it’s a good idea to think about the needs of all EA organisations at once because there might also be solutions that allow meeting them for everyone while avoiding duplicating work.
Hey, it would be good to confirm the attitudes in this post with users and people with experience, like talented developers and project managers, and by bring up specific use cases.
Like, I think I know someone who has spent time with a few executive directors and people with chief in their title or something.
Over the decades, these people see a large supply of meta advice, and this meta advice is of varying quality.
One realm of this kind of advice is in tech, and one subset is “use [my] [website/app/platform/framework] because [this other thing is a dinosaur] and [all the cool people are using it]”.
The downside of following advice is that people can be lead down the garden path, and distract and suck up time.
When new technologies are pushed without a specific explanation of usefulness, I think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
I don’t think the solution is to set our “information cascade parameter” to maximum or choose the modal platform and get EA a Salesforce rep or something.
Maybe we can hear from a number of people in the community with good instincts and experience.
To be “inside model” or something, and talk on a pretty narrow set of claims concretely:
I know someone who built a few websites with Wordpress and also uses much cooler, no code apps (and there’s a fair supply of these apps nowadays).
Yeah, Wordpress has been around a long time, and I’m sure it’s clunky. But it also has a large marketplace of help that is available. Also, this person wasn’t an expert and built a WordPress site in about 15 hours, and it looks better than CEA or Open Phil.
Ok, so this gives the impression that WordPress is for starter websites. While it’s easy to use, it’s pretty limited. It is a tool that a sophisticated org should outgrow.
But what about claims we can find here?
https://wiredelta.com/10-most-popular-wordpress-websites-of-2021/
From the above, it seems like the Walt Disney company, Zillow, TED Blog, BBC America, Blender use WordPress?
(from https://wordpress.org/showcase/the-walt-disney-company/)
The point of the post is to be mostly descriptive. I don’t see where you get the idea I’m trying to push any particular tech. I have not advised anyone to replace their web platform unless they have explicitly asked for it, and I think WordPress is an excellent choice. Using website builders is and has always been, a trade-off between user convenience and developer convenience, and if you work in this industry you know this. I think you’re reading far too much into what I’m reporting here. Also, I’ve worked as a full-stack web developer for 15+ years, at larger companies, startups, web agencies, and as a freelancer.
To clarify what I mean by system-level thinking:
Instead of thinking of every EA org as an isolated entity with isolated needs, I think of all of them as a collective. There is technical knowledge to be transferred between them and improvements that can be made to all organisations at once. For example, several organisations I’ve talked to have an interest in creating a job board, or improving the one they have. At the same time, I have also talked to 80,000 Hours about their plans for their job board and the fact they are hiring a director to run that specific project. This tells me there’s an opportunity for them to expand the functionality of their job board to a point where several of the other organisations don’t need one of their own. Maybe creating job boards for smaller organisations shouldn’t be a priority until it’s clear what’s happening with this popular, already existent job board.
I just think it’s a good idea to think about the needs of all EA organisations at once because there might also be solutions that allow meeting them for everyone while avoiding duplicating work.