Thomas Billington’s EAForum account. I am the co-founder of Fish Welfare Initiative. I also work as a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Associate at The Mission Motor.
My particular areas of passion are:
Creating change for farmed animals in low and middle-income countries
Bringing better monitoring and evaluation to the animal movement
Tom from The Mission Motor here (have also done some more general M&E consulting in the EA space).
In my opinion, there is a lot of room for growth in M&E best practice in the (non-global development) EA space. There is often an appetite for M&E, but there is a real lack of knowledge and expertise. This to me presents a big opportunity where behaviour change is needed and also easier to obtain (though still not easy).
You can also have a snowball effect if you change the norms in the EA space. Personally, I feel like current concepts of measuring progress and impact in (again, mostly non-global dev) EA spaces are rudimentary. For example, we tend to focus on speculative cost-effective analysis as the primary method of assessing projects, even when they are still in the ideation phase. I believe this is, at least in part, because there is not an understanding of alternate M&E tools (e.g. setting up a good monitoring system for evaluating a theory of change).
I exclude the global development space as ideas from groups like IPA and IDInsight have permeated more there.
So my opinion would be strongly pro-working with EAs.