Sarah, thanks for the post, very interesting. 2 ideas:
1) Why not form a group of volunteers that will be a combination of: - a focus group (to test new ideas or have quick surveys or something else) and— an advisory group (to propose new ideas)?
2) Why not have a regular remote (text only or video) interview with an interesting (but maybe not so well-known) person from outside of EA? You could post a list of potential candidates (and broad topics) for such an interview (whom we may already know how to approach) and ask to vote. To add some extra weight to their votes, people could complement them with some specific questions to the “speakers” they choose. Of course, you could also choose some speakers solely at your team’s discretion.
This will: (a) generate new interesting content for the users and (b) at the same time will attract more attention to EA.
The author is a top expert on Russia but he is not widely known outside of Russia-focused expert community, so he is clearly undervalued from the viewpoint of publicity. And there are a lot of such interesting people.
And finally, my strong view is that if suddenly EA forum disappeared it could not be substituted by any other platform—neither Reddit, nor Twitter, nor Substack nor something else. So please continue to move on!
We do this to some extent. Users can “Opt into experimental (beta) features” via their account settings, and we will sometime release features early for them and ask for feedback or see how they interact with it. We also do normal user interviews during feature development.
I will also reiterate that we are looking for volunteers to help us do cause-specific community building, and we would very likely reach out to those volunteers for quick feedback about Forum things.
My colleague Emma has done one of these. We’d be interested to do more of this but we need help figuring out who to interview, so we’d welcome more suggestions!
Our Content Manager Toby has done these for people more closely associated with EA, but he is our only person working on Forum content so he is quite busy. It’s hard to prioritize doing a single interview over spending the same time encouraging multiple authors to write content.
I think that interviewing knowledgable people and sharing on the Forum is quite valuable, so I want to encourage other users to do this! :) I’ve also considered having our team commission this kind of work, which we may do at some point.
Sarah, thanks for the post, very interesting. 2 ideas:
1) Why not form a group of volunteers that will be a combination of:
- a focus group (to test new ideas or have quick surveys or something else) and—
an advisory group (to propose new ideas)?
2) Why not have a regular remote (text only or video) interview with an interesting (but maybe not so well-known) person from outside of EA? You could post a list of potential candidates (and broad topics) for such an interview (whom we may already know how to approach) and ask to vote. To add some extra weight to their votes, people could complement them with some specific questions to the “speakers” they choose. Of course, you could also choose some speakers solely at your team’s discretion.
This will: (a) generate new interesting content for the users and (b) at the same time will attract more attention to EA.
Just as an example—here is a research report on the Russian funding of war that was recently widely quoted—https://navigatingrussia.substack.com/p/russias-hidden-war-debt
The author is a top expert on Russia but he is not widely known outside of Russia-focused expert community, so he is clearly undervalued from the viewpoint of publicity. And there are a lot of such interesting people.
And finally, my strong view is that if suddenly EA forum disappeared it could not be substituted by any other platform—neither Reddit, nor Twitter, nor Substack nor something else. So please continue to move on!
Thanks for the suggestions!
We do this to some extent. Users can “Opt into experimental (beta) features” via their account settings, and we will sometime release features early for them and ask for feedback or see how they interact with it. We also do normal user interviews during feature development.
We also encourage people to comment here if they have ideas for the Forum, or reach out to us directly.
I will also reiterate that we are looking for volunteers to help us do cause-specific community building, and we would very likely reach out to those volunteers for quick feedback about Forum things.
My colleague Emma has done one of these. We’d be interested to do more of this but we need help figuring out who to interview, so we’d welcome more suggestions!
Our Content Manager Toby has done these for people more closely associated with EA, but he is our only person working on Forum content so he is quite busy. It’s hard to prioritize doing a single interview over spending the same time encouraging multiple authors to write content.
I think that interviewing knowledgable people and sharing on the Forum is quite valuable, so I want to encourage other users to do this! :) I’ve also considered having our team commission this kind of work, which we may do at some point.