I've noticed a lack of a standardised library/system for more accessible Community Projects. The community projects tab focuses on larger projects, and creating a new EA hotel is grand and all but, I doubt there's any random university group that will be able to do so. Since that's the case, this post is about assembling a voting system on Community projects that are accessible for EA groups and individuals with a preference for scalable ones (that more than one group or person could do it).
However, I'm uncertain whether I've hit the nail on the head with the structure that I'm currently thinking of. Therefore, I would love to hear your improvements on this.
Plan of action
EA Forum Category
Currently, the main plan is to use an EA forum category to have people vote on simpler community projects and then focus on the ones that end up on top. This will be done under the tag: Project Voting.
Structure of the Projects
- Doable for communities or individuals, things that you don't need immense EA experience for, e.g. setting up a lecture on campus. This doesn't mean it must be easy, but it should be executable for a university group.
- Try to give some guidance on how people should do it, don't just say, "oh, someone should create a website to categorise all EA professors", but give some guidance where you think someone should go with it as well.
- Update on the feedback you get in the comments to make things as efficient as possible, and don't be afraid to give feedback!
- Community part where you guys fill in what the fourth part of the structure should be.
- Give a time estimate, e.g. 10 hours over 3 weeks.
Examples of Community Projects:
The following are some examples of projects that seem practical but doable for someone with some EA experience. The idea is to crowdsource ideas under a tag to get better ones, so yeah, don't critique me too much, ok?
Hosting a smaller conference or talk
Time estimate: 5-50 hours during 5-15 weeks
Booking a venue and inviting some local EA researchers or academics in related fields to hold lectures for half a day between 12 and 17. The idea here is to give a step-by-step guide and customer support on finding a venue, fixing lecturers, fixing food and refreshments, and applying for funding from CEA. Of course, one could also just invite one lecturer to a university and call it that. There are different difficulty levels.
Link to post
Running an "insert brand-name" day
Time estimate: Short to mid-term investment 10-30 hours during 3-10 weeks
This is quite similar to hosting a smaller conference but a bit easier. For example, if one finds themselves at a university during May. It might be good to have an Effective Thesis day as people would be in the process of choosing a thesis topic. The EA group or individual would first advertise Effective Thesis with coffee in order to make people listen to an introduction of Effective Thesis and then later on in the day have a lecture and/or a workshop on a university. One can develop this for a bunch of different organisations, such as Charity Entrepreneurship or GiveWell or any other brand-name day.
Link to post
Creating and updating EA Infrastructure
Creating EA Infrastructure (mainly websites)
Time estimate: Long-term investment of 30-100 hours during 3-12 months
This project is itself trying to create new EA infrastructure for communities so that the efficiency of people in EA goes up and to get those sweet, sweet, expected utils. It is one of the most efficient ways to improve the speed of growth in the EA community, and there are many random things that you can make a lot easier for people. The following website is an example of an effectiveness increase as it streamlines EA group organisation: https://handbook.globalchallengesproject.org/. We also have our good old https://resources.eahub.org/events/ for the same reason, but it is not as streamlined.
EA infrastructure is especially impactful for increasing the capacity of the earlier parts of the community funnel. To make an overgeneralisation, many EA people get sucked into the more significant projects and have no time over for the early career funnel. Yet, as we say in Sweden, "many small streams form a large river". I can create a website such as https://eacommunityprojects.com/ in around 5 hours for 100 dollars, which might generate some cascading value down the line (I hope). This can easily be streamlined, and the highest cost here is the server use which can be shared from multiple sites.
Updating EA Infrastructure
If that feels too difficult, one can help update and improve the previously made EA Infrastructure. One easy step is, for example, to find even better low-cost projects to run. On that note, if anyone is interested in helping to set up some projects, I would love some more help.
Link to post
Concerns
To website or not to website
In my mind, creating a website might be a part of the plan as it would allow more easily accessible resources to people creating projects. It would also make it easier to add resources to help people run the projects. The website I currently have done is: https://eacommunityprojects.com/
On the other hand, one could also skip this part as one could probably contact the people writing the post and ask to add resources to the post they have created. I'm leaning more towards the second approach, but I would like to know what you guys think here as well.
Help out
Of course, those are just some examples that I've thought of. I would love it if you could add some more proposals on the tag project voting. I would also love for you to upvote the ones that you find the most effective ones so that people can have an easy time finding the more time-efficient ones.
Now we need some more people interested to get this started, so I'll give you this great EA argument. If you can get two other people interested in this tag and then help out, you have increased the efficiency a lot more than you could have done yourself!
(On a final note, I really like how EA has somewhat of an internal pyramid scheme with convincing others.)