Proposal for managing community requests on the forum

I’d like to use the forum to request or suggest projects/​posts that I wished existed or to ask for help with specific tasks. Ideally, to quickly jot down a post with a title like “wanted—a breakdown of Russ Robert’s worldview and disagreements with EA” and a short description in the post so that people can understand the specifics.

Also, I’d like to easily get a list of all these requests so that I could easily see if there is anything I can help with and for others that are interested in doing some EA volunteer work to have a good list to point them to.

Lastly, it is essential to get quick feedback on projects. Many such requests might already have a solution unknown to the writer. The volunteer would like to gauge how much the community values the task. There should also be a way to see if the task has been completed adequately.

Proposal

I propose a simple MVP that uses the forum and requires minimal technical and norm changes. There are several ways of moving forward if this will be used well that require more work but might make it more valuable.

Technical

I suggest adding a new tag (say “uncompleted-community-request”) to be used on posts with a specific request like the example above.

This tag will be hidden by default for non-users and will have a default visibility penalty in addition to the Community penalty for logged-in users (of, say, 15 karma).

Then, anyone can see the list of “uncompleted community requests” on the respective tag page, sorted by either post or tag upvotes.

Norms

I’d want to encourage anyone to write down as many requests as they want. This shouldn’t be problematic and spam too much, because of the default hide/​penalty.

I’d want to encourage users to glance over these requests occasionally and upvote the posts that they think are an important request.

I’d want to encourage people to downvote the “uncompleted-community-requests” tag when the request seems to be completed.