I think my fundamental initial objection is that I don’t understand the value that “effective altruism” brings to this compared to existing commercial marketplaces.
If you have a skill that is well understood and tractable to an internet based market place—there is a powerful incentive for people to create commercial market places for those skills. Indeed—commercial market places for such skills are THE hot silicon valley startup at the moment (” look at how many startups are being called the uber of X”).
If there is value in a more generalised market place—I think all the EA angle does is massively restrict the pool of potential buyers and sellers to people who understand what EA is. (possibly some reputation effects? but only if the community is very very small)
As a commercial proposition this seems like an ambitious but dubious and very vague plan. As an EA idea it seems hopeless. Don’t worry though—good to spitball ideas like this in public and shows a great deal of bravery and a commendable attitude to do so. A character flaw in myself is that I shoot down my own ideas far too readily I think rather than trusting in others to reach out and see what they think.
I appreciate the feedback. I also shoot down most of my ideas, but I thought this one was worth sharing. I don’t want to be in the position of “defending” the viability of the idea, but I will at least attempt to clarify it:
I did not imagine this ultimately catering primarily to the EA community, which is why I didn’t think of .impact or impact certificates as alternatives. I imagined a widely used site like Craigslist on which people advertised random skills and needs. I didn’t imagine an explicit “EA angle” other than that the goal was to get the most out of people’s time and encourage them to direct the proceeds to the best charities.
The idea behind creating a new site was twofold: First is that my perception (which might well be wrong) was that there is not presently a market for people to sell a few hours of their time a week. There is certainly a market for people who want to sell their talents as a closer-to-full-time profession. And there might be a market for people who want to sell a few hours on the weekend for certain services. But I didn’t think what I envisioned existed. Again, I could be wrong (and it might be that voolla.org is trying to do exactly that).
Second is that I thought it at least possible that the site might develop momentum as a consequence of the charity angle. In other words, if the same service is offered for the same price on a regular commercial site and on this site, why not use this site and help the world at the same time? Relatedly, users of the site would be able to signal their charitable work.
They’re not seriously damaging omissions, but things you might want to address are:
How is this better than people just spending their time then claiming impact certificates? Should marginal resources just be spent on scaling up that?
How can you attract non-EA users? Scaling beyond our limited community is a critical challenge for a project that relies on its network of users, and this has been too tricky for other .impact projects in the past.
Do we gain that much by making it for charity? Presumably most people are more motivated by just having cash, and you could take some nominal cut. If you take out the charity part, it starts sounding more like Mechanical Turk, the already-thriving marketplace for low-skilled online work. What is our value add over and above that?
How can we get people to be paid for their full-value? I guess we want to distance it from cheap outsourcing like Mechanical Turk, because that’s low paid. So somehow, you want to make it have more of a ‘consulting’-like feel. But a big challenge in consulting is that it’s mostly selling to large business that are choosing based on reputation, or personal knowledge of a boutique consultant.
So would it be better to start an actual consultancy, and then use the work of a small handful of trusted professionals?
I think using these resources is important, so hopefully these comparisons and challenges lead to some fruitful thinking.
(Disclosure: an advisor to my organization is the founder of Voolla)
Voolla turns volunteer skills into money for charities. We do this by providing an online marketplace where Service Providers with skills are matched to buyers of those skills, with a portion of the project fee going to charity.
One could also use elance.com. The money doesn’t go directly to charity, but it would be easy enough to donate the money once you receive it. On the other hand, I’ve been pretty disappointed in elance: many of the jobs advertised are just content farming.
(Friendly reminder that another great place to use your spare time to do good is .impact, an EA volunteering group.)
Yes, I meant to include a shout-out to .impact. Consider this a belated one.
I think my fundamental initial objection is that I don’t understand the value that “effective altruism” brings to this compared to existing commercial marketplaces.
If you have a skill that is well understood and tractable to an internet based market place—there is a powerful incentive for people to create commercial market places for those skills. Indeed—commercial market places for such skills are THE hot silicon valley startup at the moment (” look at how many startups are being called the uber of X”).
If there is value in a more generalised market place—I think all the EA angle does is massively restrict the pool of potential buyers and sellers to people who understand what EA is. (possibly some reputation effects? but only if the community is very very small)
As a commercial proposition this seems like an ambitious but dubious and very vague plan. As an EA idea it seems hopeless. Don’t worry though—good to spitball ideas like this in public and shows a great deal of bravery and a commendable attitude to do so. A character flaw in myself is that I shoot down my own ideas far too readily I think rather than trusting in others to reach out and see what they think.
I appreciate the feedback. I also shoot down most of my ideas, but I thought this one was worth sharing. I don’t want to be in the position of “defending” the viability of the idea, but I will at least attempt to clarify it:
I did not imagine this ultimately catering primarily to the EA community, which is why I didn’t think of .impact or impact certificates as alternatives. I imagined a widely used site like Craigslist on which people advertised random skills and needs. I didn’t imagine an explicit “EA angle” other than that the goal was to get the most out of people’s time and encourage them to direct the proceeds to the best charities.
The idea behind creating a new site was twofold: First is that my perception (which might well be wrong) was that there is not presently a market for people to sell a few hours of their time a week. There is certainly a market for people who want to sell their talents as a closer-to-full-time profession. And there might be a market for people who want to sell a few hours on the weekend for certain services. But I didn’t think what I envisioned existed. Again, I could be wrong (and it might be that voolla.org is trying to do exactly that).
Second is that I thought it at least possible that the site might develop momentum as a consequence of the charity angle. In other words, if the same service is offered for the same price on a regular commercial site and on this site, why not use this site and help the world at the same time? Relatedly, users of the site would be able to signal their charitable work.
A promising idea.
They’re not seriously damaging omissions, but things you might want to address are:
How is this better than people just spending their time then claiming impact certificates? Should marginal resources just be spent on scaling up that?
How can you attract non-EA users? Scaling beyond our limited community is a critical challenge for a project that relies on its network of users, and this has been too tricky for other .impact projects in the past.
Do we gain that much by making it for charity? Presumably most people are more motivated by just having cash, and you could take some nominal cut. If you take out the charity part, it starts sounding more like Mechanical Turk, the already-thriving marketplace for low-skilled online work. What is our value add over and above that?
How can we get people to be paid for their full-value? I guess we want to distance it from cheap outsourcing like Mechanical Turk, because that’s low paid. So somehow, you want to make it have more of a ‘consulting’-like feel. But a big challenge in consulting is that it’s mostly selling to large business that are choosing based on reputation, or personal knowledge of a boutique consultant.
So would it be better to start an actual consultancy, and then use the work of a small handful of trusted professionals?
I think using these resources is important, so hopefully these comparisons and challenges lead to some fruitful thinking.
Not exactly what you describe, but pretty close: http://www.voolla.org
(Disclosure: an advisor to my organization is the founder of Voolla) Voolla turns volunteer skills into money for charities. We do this by providing an online marketplace where Service Providers with skills are matched to buyers of those skills, with a portion of the project fee going to charity.
Yeah there’s actually more than just that. There’s a decent few in this space.
This IS quite similar! Thanks. Will look further into it.
One could also use elance.com. The money doesn’t go directly to charity, but it would be easy enough to donate the money once you receive it. On the other hand, I’ve been pretty disappointed in elance: many of the jobs advertised are just content farming.