Many fairly complicated tasks can be broken down into tasks that are fairly simple to carry out. All it takes is some ingenuity and some investment to spend the time to systematize the thing well enough that people can do the thing (Amazon Mechanical Turk comes to mind).
I’ve worked somewhat extensively with volunteers, and I find that only a small minority is actually willing to put in the work completely pro bono. Most volunteer work confers at least some benefit for the volunteer. If it doesn’t, you usually find that turnover is so large that the overhead isn’t worth it. In the case of regular volunteering, these benefits would be upgrading the community you’re a part of, or perhaps learning skills or upgrading your CV, or maybe just fun. In EA I find that the motivation is often social interaction with like-minded peers.
First 2 points imply that, at least in my limited experience, the bottleneck is incentivizing people to show up consistently.
It seems that this requirement is sometimes automatically met if the volunteering happens offline. There’s something about physicality and interacting with people that can be rewarding enough for the volunteer to keep showing up. That kind of magic is much less potent when you’re online. If we could do something about that, it might be a breakthrough.
Should there be no one task Y, but a bag of small tasks \(Y_1, Y_2, …,\) there might still be a “incentive Z” that all of them could employ to help motivate people to help with things. The most obvious solution for Z is money, but there might be cultural ones that are much more scalable.
An example to illustrate the last 2 points: if there was some kind of cozy online “EA living room” that was fun to hang around in but also repeatedly prompted people to “score points” to do things, that might be both scalable and keep people showing up. Maybe this wouldn’t scale into the millions, but it would at least keep “soft EA’s” meaningfully involved.
Some thoughts:
Many fairly complicated tasks can be broken down into tasks that are fairly simple to carry out. All it takes is some ingenuity and some investment to spend the time to systematize the thing well enough that people can do the thing (Amazon Mechanical Turk comes to mind).
I’ve worked somewhat extensively with volunteers, and I find that only a small minority is actually willing to put in the work completely pro bono. Most volunteer work confers at least some benefit for the volunteer. If it doesn’t, you usually find that turnover is so large that the overhead isn’t worth it. In the case of regular volunteering, these benefits would be upgrading the community you’re a part of, or perhaps learning skills or upgrading your CV, or maybe just fun. In EA I find that the motivation is often social interaction with like-minded peers.
First 2 points imply that, at least in my limited experience, the bottleneck is incentivizing people to show up consistently.
It seems that this requirement is sometimes automatically met if the volunteering happens offline. There’s something about physicality and interacting with people that can be rewarding enough for the volunteer to keep showing up. That kind of magic is much less potent when you’re online. If we could do something about that, it might be a breakthrough.
Should there be no one task Y, but a bag of small tasks \(Y_1, Y_2, …,\) there might still be a “incentive Z” that all of them could employ to help motivate people to help with things. The most obvious solution for Z is money, but there might be cultural ones that are much more scalable.
An example to illustrate the last 2 points: if there was some kind of cozy online “EA living room” that was fun to hang around in but also repeatedly prompted people to “score points” to do things, that might be both scalable and keep people showing up. Maybe this wouldn’t scale into the millions, but it would at least keep “soft EA’s” meaningfully involved.