Hello! I'm Toby. I'm Content Manager at CEA. I work with the Online Team to make sure the Forum is a great place to discuss doing the most good we can. You'll see me posting a lot, authoring the EA Newsletter and curating Forum Digests, making moderator comments and decisions, and more.
Before working at CEA, I studied Philosophy at the University of Warwick, and worked for a couple of years on a range of writing and editing projects within the EA space. Recently I helped run the Amplify Creative Grants program, to encourage more impactful podcasting and YouTube projects. You can find a bit of my own creative output on my blog, and my podcast feed.
Reach out to me if you're worried about your first post, want to double check Forum norms, or are confused or curious about anything relating to the EA Forum.
I've had a couple of organisations ask me to clarify the Donation Election's vote-brigading rules. Understandably, they want to promote the donation election amongst their supporters, but they aren't sure to what extent this is vote-brigading. The answer is- it depends.
We want to avoid the Donation Election being a popularity contest/ favouring the candidates with bigger networks. Neither popularity, nor size of network, is perfectly correlated with impact.
If you'd like to reach out to your audience, feel free, but please don't tell them to vote for you. You can explain the event, and mention that you are a candidate, but we want the votes to inform us of the Forum audience's opinions of marginal impact of money donated to these charities, not to the strength of their networks.
I'm aware this exortation won't do all the work- we will also be looking into voting patterns, and new accounts (made after October 22, when the election was announced) won't be eligible to vote.
My first guess is that if this did happen, we'd keep the votes open slightly longer until there wasn't a tie - this is another benefit of having a secret deadline. I'll check with @Will Howard🔹 when he's online to see if there is already a solution to this. Thanks for pointing it out!
@Esben Kran - here is your Puffin!