I think this is a straightforwardly good idea; I would pay a $5k bounty to someone who makes “EA comms” as good as e.g. internal Google comms, which is IMO not an extremely high bar.
I think an important point (that Ozzie does identify) is that it’s not a simple as just setting up a couple systems, but rather doing all of the work that goes in shepherding a community and making it feel alive. Especially in the early days, there’s a difference between a Slack that feels “alive” and “dead” and a single good moderator/poster who commits to posting daily can make the difference. I don’t know that this needs to be a fulltime person; my happy price for doing this myself would be like $20k/year?
Regarding leaks: I don’t think the value of better internal comms is in “guaranteed privacy of info”. It’s more in “reducing friction to communicate across orgs” and in “increasing the chance that your message is actually read by the people”. And there’s a big difference between “an ill-intentioned insider has the ability to screenshot and repost your message to Twitter” to “by default, every muckraker can scroll through your entire posting history”.
Public venues like EA Forum and Facebook are a firehose that are very difficult for busy people to stay on top of; private venues like chat groups are too chaotically organized and give me kind of an ugh-field feeling.
Some random ideas:
Create the “One EA Slack/Discord to rule them all”. Or extend out of an existing eg Constellation chat.
Ask EAG attendees to use that instead of Swapcard messaging, so that all EAG attendees are thrown into one long-lived messaging system
Integrate chat into EA Forum (DMs feel too much like email at the moment)
Integrate chat into Manifold (though Manifold is much less of a Schelling point for EA than EAF)
Start lists of Google Groups (though this competes a bit against the EAF’s subforums)
I think this is a straightforwardly good idea; I would pay a $5k bounty to someone who makes “EA comms” as good as e.g. internal Google comms, which is IMO not an extremely high bar.
I think an important point (that Ozzie does identify) is that it’s not a simple as just setting up a couple systems, but rather doing all of the work that goes in shepherding a community and making it feel alive. Especially in the early days, there’s a difference between a Slack that feels “alive” and “dead” and a single good moderator/poster who commits to posting daily can make the difference. I don’t know that this needs to be a fulltime person; my happy price for doing this myself would be like $20k/year?
Regarding leaks: I don’t think the value of better internal comms is in “guaranteed privacy of info”. It’s more in “reducing friction to communicate across orgs” and in “increasing the chance that your message is actually read by the people”. And there’s a big difference between “an ill-intentioned insider has the ability to screenshot and repost your message to Twitter” to “by default, every muckraker can scroll through your entire posting history”.
Public venues like EA Forum and Facebook are a firehose that are very difficult for busy people to stay on top of; private venues like chat groups are too chaotically organized and give me kind of an ugh-field feeling.
Some random ideas:
Create the “One EA Slack/Discord to rule them all”. Or extend out of an existing eg Constellation chat.
Ask EAG attendees to use that instead of Swapcard messaging, so that all EAG attendees are thrown into one long-lived messaging system
Integrate chat into EA Forum (DMs feel too much like email at the moment)
Integrate chat into Manifold (though Manifold is much less of a Schelling point for EA than EAF)
Start lists of Google Groups (though this competes a bit against the EAF’s subforums)