Thank you Marek and the whole CEA team for taking on this project! I love your initiative and what you outline seems like a very valuable and necessary step for the EA community. If things work out as you imagine, EA could be one of the first science-driven communities with a strong “community-reviewed” journal type offering (in this vein it may make sense to introduce different types of “publications” – idea, project report, scientific publication, etc. – with different standards for review and moderation). Very inspiring!
A question that comes to my mind would be your plans and stance on making user profiles/data accessible to external partners and integrations. For example, I am investing some time into thinking about the funding pipeline in EA right now, in particular with a focus on small scale projects which seem to be falling through the cracks right now. Having a funding platform integrate with the community system and trust measures of the EA forum could be a game changer for this (for people interest in this topic get in touch on the rethink slack #ti-funding or https://gitlab.com/effective-altruism/funding-pipeline – it’s not much put down right now, but there are already some people interested in this space). Given that the Less Wrong 2.0 codebase is open source it should be possible to develop secure means of integration between different platforms if the provider of the forum enables it. Did you consider these kind of long-term use cases in your planning so far? Do you have a vision for how collaboration with “non-CEA” affiliated projects could look in the future?
Two thoughts, one on the object-level, one on the meta.
On the object level, I’m skeptical that we need yet another platform for funding coordination. This is more of a first-blush intuition, and I don’t propose we have a long discussion on it here, but just wanted to add my $0.02 as a weak datapoint. (Disclosure — I’m part of the team that built EA Funds and work at CEA which runs EA Grants so make of that what you will. Also, to the extent that the sense that small projects are falling through the gaps because of evaluation-capacity constraints, CEA is currently in the process of hiring a Grants evaluator.)
On the meta level (i.e. how open should we be to adding arbitrary integrations that can access a user’s forum account data) I think there’s definitely some merit to this, and that I can envisage cool things that could be built on top of it. However, my first-blush take is that providing an OAuth layer, exposing user data etc, is unlikely to be a very high priority (at least from the CEA side) when considered against other possible feature improvements and other CEA priorities, especially given the likely time cost involved in maintaining the auth system where it interfaces with other services, and the magnitude of the impact that I’d expect having EA Forum data integrated with such a service would have. However, as you note, the LW codebase is open source, so I’d suggest submitting an issue there, discussing with the core devs and making the case, and possibly submitting a PR if it’s something that would be sufficiently useful to a project you’re working on.
Regarding the funding project, this was just meant to be one example of a possible project which could profit from integration. So I wasn’t really trying to argue the merits of the projects in any detailed manner. However, to somewhat counterbalance your argument, the way I see it, it seems to make sense to try to aggregate resources around existing funding opportunities to help people try to understand the space better. From my own experience it takes some time to wrap your head around who is offering what, in what format, etc. So there seems to be room for improved coordination which may or may not involve new artifacts/software/platform to be developed. Moreover, having people be interested in this kind of topic seems to be a win for the community to me, I don’t think we are at the point where returns are diminishing drastically (i.e., one CEA grant evaluator is not gonna fix everything). If you want to talk in more depth about the topic I would love for you to join the slack channel or contact me by mail: alex{at}herwix.com.
Regarding the meta point, this really was the gist of my post. I appreciate the positive attitude you seem to have towards a somewhat “open” model as I think that this would be an important step for the community from a technological point of view. As you say there are lots of cool things that could be done, once we have sorted out some of the basic infrastructure questions. CEA being open to integrating pull requests in this direction would be an awesome first step :)
Thank you Marek and the whole CEA team for taking on this project! I love your initiative and what you outline seems like a very valuable and necessary step for the EA community. If things work out as you imagine, EA could be one of the first science-driven communities with a strong “community-reviewed” journal type offering (in this vein it may make sense to introduce different types of “publications” – idea, project report, scientific publication, etc. – with different standards for review and moderation). Very inspiring!
A question that comes to my mind would be your plans and stance on making user profiles/data accessible to external partners and integrations. For example, I am investing some time into thinking about the funding pipeline in EA right now, in particular with a focus on small scale projects which seem to be falling through the cracks right now. Having a funding platform integrate with the community system and trust measures of the EA forum could be a game changer for this (for people interest in this topic get in touch on the rethink slack #ti-funding or https://gitlab.com/effective-altruism/funding-pipeline – it’s not much put down right now, but there are already some people interested in this space). Given that the Less Wrong 2.0 codebase is open source it should be possible to develop secure means of integration between different platforms if the provider of the forum enables it. Did you consider these kind of long-term use cases in your planning so far? Do you have a vision for how collaboration with “non-CEA” affiliated projects could look in the future?
Two thoughts, one on the object-level, one on the meta.
On the object level, I’m skeptical that we need yet another platform for funding coordination. This is more of a first-blush intuition, and I don’t propose we have a long discussion on it here, but just wanted to add my $0.02 as a weak datapoint. (Disclosure — I’m part of the team that built EA Funds and work at CEA which runs EA Grants so make of that what you will. Also, to the extent that the sense that small projects are falling through the gaps because of evaluation-capacity constraints, CEA is currently in the process of hiring a Grants evaluator.)
On the meta level (i.e. how open should we be to adding arbitrary integrations that can access a user’s forum account data) I think there’s definitely some merit to this, and that I can envisage cool things that could be built on top of it. However, my first-blush take is that providing an OAuth layer, exposing user data etc, is unlikely to be a very high priority (at least from the CEA side) when considered against other possible feature improvements and other CEA priorities, especially given the likely time cost involved in maintaining the auth system where it interfaces with other services, and the magnitude of the impact that I’d expect having EA Forum data integrated with such a service would have. However, as you note, the LW codebase is open source, so I’d suggest submitting an issue there, discussing with the core devs and making the case, and possibly submitting a PR if it’s something that would be sufficiently useful to a project you’re working on.
Thanks for your comment Sam!
Regarding the funding project, this was just meant to be one example of a possible project which could profit from integration. So I wasn’t really trying to argue the merits of the projects in any detailed manner. However, to somewhat counterbalance your argument, the way I see it, it seems to make sense to try to aggregate resources around existing funding opportunities to help people try to understand the space better. From my own experience it takes some time to wrap your head around who is offering what, in what format, etc. So there seems to be room for improved coordination which may or may not involve new artifacts/software/platform to be developed. Moreover, having people be interested in this kind of topic seems to be a win for the community to me, I don’t think we are at the point where returns are diminishing drastically (i.e., one CEA grant evaluator is not gonna fix everything). If you want to talk in more depth about the topic I would love for you to join the slack channel or contact me by mail: alex{at}herwix.com.
Regarding the meta point, this really was the gist of my post. I appreciate the positive attitude you seem to have towards a somewhat “open” model as I think that this would be an important step for the community from a technological point of view. As you say there are lots of cool things that could be done, once we have sorted out some of the basic infrastructure questions. CEA being open to integrating pull requests in this direction would be an awesome first step :)