If I wanted to make a blog post / message / recording accessible to a “large subset of effective altruist professionals”, I’m not sure how I’d do that.
I don’t think we yet have:
One accepted chat system
An internal blogging system
Any internal email lists (for a very wide net of EA professionals)
It’s nice to encourage people to communicate publicly, but there’s a lot of communication that’s really not meant for that.
Generally, the existing options are:
Post to your internal org slack/emails (note: many EA orgs are tiny)
Share with people in your office
Post to one of a few domain-specific and idiosyncratic Slacks/Discords
Post publicly, for everyone to see
I think the SBF situation might have shown some substantial vulnerability here. It was a crisis where public statements were taken as serious legal statements. This meant that EA leadership essentially didn’t have a real method of communicating with most EAs.
I feel like much of EA is a lot like one big org that tries really hard not to be one big org. This gives us some advantages of being decentralized, but we are missing a lot of the advantages of centralization. If “Professional EAs” were looked at as one large org, I’d expect that we’d look fairly amateur, compared to other sizeable organizations.
A very simple way to make progress on internal communications is to separate the issue into a few clusters, and then attack each one separately.
Access/Onboarding/Offboarding Make official lists that cover “professional/trusted members”. You could start with simple criteria like “works at an org funded by an EA funder” or “went to 2+ EAGs”.
Negotiation and Moderation ”EA Professionals” might basically be an “enterprise”, and need “enterprise tools”. These often are expensive and require negotiation.
A Responsible Individual My preference would be that we find someone who did a good job at this sort of thing in other sizeable companies and try to get them to do it here.
I bet with $200k/year for the talent, plus maybe $200k-$1k/year, we could have a decent setup, assuming we could find good enough talent. That said, this would definitely be work to establish, so I wouldn’t expect anything soon.
EA could use better internal communications infrastructure
Link post
(This was a quick post, written in around 30 min. It was originally posted on Facebook, where it generated some good discussion.)
I really wish EA had better internal communications.
If I wanted to make a blog post / message / recording accessible to a “large subset of effective altruist professionals”, I’m not sure how I’d do that.
I don’t think we yet have:
One accepted chat system
An internal blogging system
Any internal email lists (for a very wide net of EA professionals)
It’s nice to encourage people to communicate publicly, but there’s a lot of communication that’s really not meant for that.
Generally, the existing options are:
Post to your internal org slack/emails (note: many EA orgs are tiny)
Share with people in your office
Post to one of a few domain-specific and idiosyncratic Slacks/Discords
Post publicly, for everyone to see
I think the SBF situation might have shown some substantial vulnerability here. It was a crisis where public statements were taken as serious legal statements. This meant that EA leadership essentially didn’t have a real method of communicating with most EAs.
I feel like much of EA is a lot like one big org that tries really hard not to be one big org. This gives us some advantages of being decentralized, but we are missing a lot of the advantages of centralization. If “Professional EAs” were looked at as one large org, I’d expect that we’d look fairly amateur, compared to other sizeable organizations.
A very simple way to make progress on internal communications is to separate the issue into a few clusters, and then attack each one separately.
Access/Onboarding/Offboarding
Make official lists that cover “professional/trusted members”. You could start with simple criteria like “works at an org funded by an EA funder” or “went to 2+ EAGs”.
Negotiation and Moderation
”EA Professionals” might basically be an “enterprise”, and need “enterprise tools”. These often are expensive and require negotiation.
A Responsible Individual
My preference would be that we find someone who did a good job at this sort of thing in other sizeable companies and try to get them to do it here.
I bet with $200k/year for the talent, plus maybe $200k-$1k/year, we could have a decent setup, assuming we could find good enough talent. That said, this would definitely be work to establish, so I wouldn’t expect anything soon.