A meta-comment: I find your notetaking style somewhat hard to read. You shorten sentences in a way that removes important context. For example:
7:15: Male board member: Better understanding of staff work? Break down staff by function. 38 full-time staff. And between GW and Open Phil.
I take this to mean the male board member was saying something like “I would like to have a better understanding of staff work. Could you break down the staff according to their functions?” But it took me longer than I would like to interpret this—if you had written out full sentences, it would have been easier to read. This is small on its own but if I spend an extra few seconds trying to understand each line, it makes the post hard to read. I appreciate that you take the time to publish your notes; I would appreciate it even more if you took extra time to make the writing style more smooth.
I worked on this post under a fairly tight time constraint, so I was not able to clean it up in all the ways I would have liked to (including using full sentences, as you mention). There was also the concern that the post would be mostly ignored, causing my extra efforts to be wasted. Since this type of post seems to have generated a fair amount of interest, I would be willing to push for doing a cleaner job in the future.
Also, the source Markdown file for this post is available on GitHub, and, with the fairly permissive license, it would be possible for someone else to come along and fix things (or fund someone to do so); I would be happy to update this post to incorporate any significant improvements.
Maybe moving (or cross-posting) the transcripts to the EA wiki would be a better way to get people fleshing out details? GitHub doesn’t make very small changes easy, especially if there’s then a manual process (going through you) to have them synced here.
It’s already happened once in these comments that someone has been curious about a section and gone to get a precise transcript of that section, it would be nice if these little pieces of work could be reflected immediately in the published document.
Hi Ben, thanks for the suggestion. I would be fine with moving the active work to the EA Wiki, but I see two challenges: (1) the EA Wiki uses MediaWiki markup instead of Markdown; (2) the EA Wiki tends to use CC BY-SA instead of CC BY-NC-SA as its license, so GiveWell’s original license would need to explicitly be maintained.
I have a program (pandoc) which converts Markdown syntax to MediaWiki, so I can overcome (1), though it’s admittedly awkward having to potentially copy changes back and forth. I believe (2) is not an issue as long as the license is clearly stated: the wiki footer only says “Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported unless otherwise noted.” (emphasis mine)
I’m happy to create the page and put the content on it and ferry any edits back into pull requests for you, provided there’s no other reason you don’t want me to do so? (you can PM me if you want)
(Now that I’m talking about this, I think what I’d really want would be something where you had the brief notes, but you could click to expand individual brief notes to full transcript where available. But neither of our venues are natively capable of that, I think.)
I looked closer at the copyright situation. The copyright footer on the page I quote accurately, but the “create page” dialog has this commentary:
Please note that all contributions to EA Wiki are considered to be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (see EA Wiki:Copyrights for details). If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
That sounds less equivocal about the permitted licenses, and sounds like I can’t have a CC BY-NC-SA thing there.
Original content is available under the CC-0 licence unless otherwise noted. Logos, taglines, and other non-original content is owned by their respective entities, who may request removal by contacting an administrator.
which seems in contradiction with both the footer and the dialog :/
I’ll find someone I can contact to ask for clarification, and I’ll post again here if I make any progress.
There is no one central person to own the EA Wiki right now. I’m happy to change the license or have someone else change it, since the current license is just the default one from MediaWiki.
Thanks for writing up these notes!
A meta-comment: I find your notetaking style somewhat hard to read. You shorten sentences in a way that removes important context. For example:
I take this to mean the male board member was saying something like “I would like to have a better understanding of staff work. Could you break down the staff according to their functions?” But it took me longer than I would like to interpret this—if you had written out full sentences, it would have been easier to read. This is small on its own but if I spend an extra few seconds trying to understand each line, it makes the post hard to read. I appreciate that you take the time to publish your notes; I would appreciate it even more if you took extra time to make the writing style more smooth.
Thanks for the feedback, Michael.
I worked on this post under a fairly tight time constraint, so I was not able to clean it up in all the ways I would have liked to (including using full sentences, as you mention). There was also the concern that the post would be mostly ignored, causing my extra efforts to be wasted. Since this type of post seems to have generated a fair amount of interest, I would be willing to push for doing a cleaner job in the future.
Also, the source Markdown file for this post is available on GitHub, and, with the fairly permissive license, it would be possible for someone else to come along and fix things (or fund someone to do so); I would be happy to update this post to incorporate any significant improvements.
Maybe moving (or cross-posting) the transcripts to the EA wiki would be a better way to get people fleshing out details? GitHub doesn’t make very small changes easy, especially if there’s then a manual process (going through you) to have them synced here.
It’s already happened once in these comments that someone has been curious about a section and gone to get a precise transcript of that section, it would be nice if these little pieces of work could be reflected immediately in the published document.
Hi Ben, thanks for the suggestion. I would be fine with moving the active work to the EA Wiki, but I see two challenges: (1) the EA Wiki uses MediaWiki markup instead of Markdown; (2) the EA Wiki tends to use CC BY-SA instead of CC BY-NC-SA as its license, so GiveWell’s original license would need to explicitly be maintained.
I have a program (pandoc) which converts Markdown syntax to MediaWiki, so I can overcome (1), though it’s admittedly awkward having to potentially copy changes back and forth. I believe (2) is not an issue as long as the license is clearly stated: the wiki footer only says “Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported unless otherwise noted.” (emphasis mine)
I’m happy to create the page and put the content on it and ferry any edits back into pull requests for you, provided there’s no other reason you don’t want me to do so? (you can PM me if you want)
(Now that I’m talking about this, I think what I’d really want would be something where you had the brief notes, but you could click to expand individual brief notes to full transcript where available. But neither of our venues are natively capable of that, I think.)
I am fine with this plan. Feel free to reply here or message me directly if you run into difficulties or have any further questions.
I looked closer at the copyright situation. The copyright footer on the page I quote accurately, but the “create page” dialog has this commentary:
That sounds less equivocal about the permitted licenses, and sounds like I can’t have a CC BY-NC-SA thing there.
Meanwhile, that EA Wiki:Copyrights link actually says:
which seems in contradiction with both the footer and the dialog :/
I’ll find someone I can contact to ask for clarification, and I’ll post again here if I make any progress.
There is no one central person to own the EA Wiki right now. I’m happy to change the license or have someone else change it, since the current license is just the default one from MediaWiki.