Thank you for sharing your experience and your feedback! :) I’m happy to hear that the Forum has been valuable for you in the past.
I’d like to think the Forum could better blur that distinction to avoid hubs becoming silos with strong views (which I think contributes to the confusion around the public perception of EA).
I like this framing, and I think it is a real value that the Forum can provide. Seems like it fits into my point #3 here, about why a central online space is a good bet.
the Forum right now is confusing because it’s providing multiple services in one; a newspaper, an opportunities/​classifieds board, a library (the wiki) and a discussion space though not as free flowing as slack/​discord. Now with groups and CRM and event tracking it’s becoming a catch-all for EA information
Yeah this is fair. I still think that the core of the Forum is discussion. The wiki is mostly useful to organize that discussion (including making it easy to view past relevant discussions). News posts are significantly more valuable if people discuss it in the comments.
Things like job postings do provide some value to the world (sometimes it leads to people getting hired in an impactful role), but I don’t view that as the primary goal of the Forum. I think dedicated job and opportunity boards are better suited for those goals. Think of it this way: if the Forum frontpage was only job postings, then people would only come if they were looking for a job. In that situation we’ve just turned into a worse version of a dedicated job board. If the Forum frontpage was only discussion posts and had no job postings, that still seems quite valuable, and in fact feels like a reasonable state for the Forum to be in (though I don’t currently think we should separate out job postings).
Has the forum team considered reframing the Forum as an intranet?
Perhaps others on the team have, though I haven’t thought about this specific framing before. I think there is some interest from inside of CEA to move in this direction (for example, more closely integrating Swapcard/​EAG and EAGxVirtual with the Forum), so I wouldn’t be surprised if we do. I think this is certainly a possible long-term goal for the Forum, but I currently feel unsure if it’s the right fit. For now, this sounds like mostly a software product-focused play, and I’m currently more optimistic about focusing on community building than focusing on the Forum as a product. But I could imagine that once the community feels like it’s in a better place, we go back to investing in the product in a way that resembles an intranet.
Thank you for sharing your experience and your feedback! :) I’m happy to hear that the Forum has been valuable for you in the past.
I like this framing, and I think it is a real value that the Forum can provide. Seems like it fits into my point #3 here, about why a central online space is a good bet.
Yeah this is fair. I still think that the core of the Forum is discussion. The wiki is mostly useful to organize that discussion (including making it easy to view past relevant discussions). News posts are significantly more valuable if people discuss it in the comments.
Things like job postings do provide some value to the world (sometimes it leads to people getting hired in an impactful role), but I don’t view that as the primary goal of the Forum. I think dedicated job and opportunity boards are better suited for those goals. Think of it this way: if the Forum frontpage was only job postings, then people would only come if they were looking for a job. In that situation we’ve just turned into a worse version of a dedicated job board. If the Forum frontpage was only discussion posts and had no job postings, that still seems quite valuable, and in fact feels like a reasonable state for the Forum to be in (though I don’t currently think we should separate out job postings).
Perhaps others on the team have, though I haven’t thought about this specific framing before. I think there is some interest from inside of CEA to move in this direction (for example, more closely integrating Swapcard/​EAG and EAGxVirtual with the Forum), so I wouldn’t be surprised if we do. I think this is certainly a possible long-term goal for the Forum, but I currently feel unsure if it’s the right fit. For now, this sounds like mostly a software product-focused play, and I’m currently more optimistic about focusing on community building than focusing on the Forum as a product. But I could imagine that once the community feels like it’s in a better place, we go back to investing in the product in a way that resembles an intranet.