Field-building refers to influencing existing fields of research or advocacy or developing new ones, through advocacy, creating organisations, or funding people to work in the field.
Examples of field-building activities include scholarships and teaching buyouts (e.g. Forethought Foundation, several grantmakers); Charity Entrepreneurship’s Incubation Program;[1] Future of Humanity Institute’s Research Scholars Programme;[2] and conferences (such as Effective Altruism Global).
Further reading
Muehlhauser, Luke (2017) Some case studies in early field growth, Open Philanthropy, August.
Vaughan, Kerry (2016) What the EA community can learn from the rise of the neoliberals, Effective Altruism, December 5.
Related entries
academia | network building | research training programs
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Charity Entrepreneurship (2021) Incubation Program, Charity Entrepreneurship.
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Hadshar, Rose (2020) What FHI’s Research Scholars Programme is like: views from scholars, Effective Altruism Forum, August 11, 2020.
From memory, I think the following sources might be relevant and so worth adding to the Bibliography/Further reading, but I’m not sure, so hopefully someone else can check! (These things are interesting to read/listen to anyway.)
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michelle-hutchinson-global-priorities/
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-global-priorities-institute/
Maybe https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/global-priorities-research/
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-open-philanthropy/
There’s at least one relevant section, starting at “Robert Wiblin: Have you learned any other lessons that you wanna point out from the history of philanthropy?” in the transcript, but I can’t remember how much more relevant stuff there is