List-omania
Where have all the good lists gone? Or, rather, the good list-maintainers.
I’m specifically thinking about the lists linked under “Take Action” on effectivealtruism.org. It seems like a lot of the links are dead or haven’t been updated in several years. For example, in the action article ”Build lists of useful people, organizations, and resources”, the spreadsheet of high-potential technology orgs hasn’t been maintained for nearly five years.
This isn’t to call anyone out—databases and lists are hard to maintain, and we’re all really. really. busy. I’m also a little concerned that a lot of the links in the ‘take action’ section seem to link to forum posts that are also several years old. It might be good to migrate/merge some of these forum posts into sub-articles on effectivealtruism.org—for conciseness and future update-ability?
It might make sense to have a central List of Lists and a head List Librarian, or something like that, to make sure that things like lists of project ideas and lists of funding opportunities are updated regularly and are still accurate and available.
I’m working on a release strategy for a video series focused on high-impact self-started projects during COVID-19. Part of that release strategy includes a list of things that people can do to contribute their skills toward big global issues. I’m doing some of this work on my own, but it’s pretty time-consuming, and I figured someone has a more up-to-date/comprehensive list of project ideas, grants, volunteer opportunities, et cetera.
(After jotting this post down, I’m really sick of the word ‘list’.)
I made a list of lists for EA London as I couldn’t find one elsewhere that had the info I wanted to share.
Four categories that I feel like having a dynamic, maintained list would be helpful for:
1) Funding opportunities—this might include sub-sections for:
Large Grants (>$50k?),
Small Grants (<$50k?),
Micro Grants (things like covering new personal equipment, webhosting, software licenses, LLC incorporation fees?),
Learning Grants (scholarships, paying for courses, personal development, living expenses while in school?),
grants divvied up by cause area,
and grants for specific things (eg a compute credit program for independent researchers getting started, maybe a grant offering to subsidize daycare if you want to independently work on cool stuff but are spending a ton of time on childcare?)
2) Open problems/project ideas - ??? not sure how to make this work, or how to moderate this, but would be cool if possible
3) Volunteer/collaborator searches—I see a lot of posts of this type in the EA Slack teams I’m in, and it seems like these posts get lost in the milieu. These are different from EA Job Board posts, as these aren’t really jobs so much as… pre-jobs?
4) Free (legit) learning materials—anecdotally, I notice people get really stoked when they discover that so many AI related resources (eg the deep learning book) are free.50. I think this is especially true for people in developing countries, though I can’t speak to that personally. Compiling other substantial free materials, syllabi, etc related to other areas—maybe other HTML versions of textbooks? - would be cool (filtering out blatant content marketing materials and Libgen rips ofc).
Maybe we can even aspire to one day rival Wikipedia’s legendary list of lists of lists.