Hi everyone,
In summary: This month we shared our thinking on community building and representativeness. We made progress on our Q3 priorities by announcing plans for the new EA Forum and evaluating candidates in our hiring round. Additionally, more than half of the tickets for EA Global: London (26-28 October) have been sold: apply now.
Our thinking on community building and representativeness
We shared our thinking on the EA Forum about community building, representativeness, and the EA Summit. We emphasized, among other things, the reasons we feel it is important that the EA community be cause-impartial and why it seems likely that CEA’s work should be broadly cause-general. We are interested in feedback on this, and we encourage you to read our post and contribute to the discussion in the comments.
CEA’s priorities this quarter
As described in last month’s email, our aim is to continue to deeply understand and support contributors and core members of the EA community, while expanding CEA’s support to a broader group of people. To work towards this aim this quarter, we are focusing on the following:
- Launching a new EA Forum
- Building infrastructure for a public EA Grants release to allow us to accept more applicants*
- Hiring to expand our capacity
- Finalizing metrics to help us evaluate and prioritize projects
This month, we focused on building the EA Forum and evaluating candidates in our hiring round.
EA Forum
We believe that for EA to succeed intellectually, we need to have ideas shared publicly and in a way that people can build on. We want a forum that can serve as a place for top thinkers to get feedback on novel ideas, for users to begin to contribute to the community, and for all of the community, including newer members, to engage with up-to-date content. To achieve this goal, we announced plans for a new EA Forum, which will have better ways to sort content and a more appealing design. We are basing the new Forum on the successful redesign of LessWrong, and we're very grateful for help from the LessWrong team. Our Tech and Content teams are collaborating to create features like curated content and new moderation policies to improve the experience of people at all different levels of involvement with EA. Currently, CEA staff are testing a closed beta version of the Forum, and a semi-public beta version for key Forum contributors will be up in the next month.
If there are pieces you’ve been thinking of writing, we’d love to see them when the new Forum launches!
Hiring
In order to expand the support we provide to the EA community, we need additional staff capacity. In addition to US and UK Operations Specialists, who will be essential to our day-to-day operations, we are working to hire a full-time EA Grants Evaluator to be able to review and fund promising proposals, a Community Specialist to provide support outside the core EA community and an Events Specialist to help run EA Global and expand our outreach events.
Applications for our current hiring round closed on 16th July, and we are now evaluating candidates. If you would like your application to be considered for future hiring rounds at CEA, you can submit your information using our “open application” option.
* On EA Grants: We currently have a referral-only process that allows us to make a small number of grants while we don’t have a person working on this project full time. If you know any especially promising grants candidates, please contact Kerry Vaughan at kerry@centreforeffectivealtruism.org._ We plan to re-launch the public application by the end of October 2018._
Events
Effective Altruism Global
We released William MacAskill’s opening talk from EA Global: San Francisco on how effective altruism can ‘stay curious’. We believe that staying curious is critical to our work and to the success of the EA community, and we encourage you to watch the talk if you weren’t able to attend in person. More videos from the conference are being released over the next few months via our Youtube channel.
In the meantime, more than half of tickets have already been sold for EA Global: London, taking place from 26-28 October 2018. So if you’re thinking about attending, apply now! If you’re interested in gaining some operations experience and accessing the conference for free, you can learn more about volunteering on our website.
EA Summit
CEA decided to make a grant to support the EA Summit organized by Paradigm Academy with participation from Rethink Charity and Charity Science. Three CEA staff members attended the conference, and our impression was that the conference was a success. The focus of the conference was building the EA community, and attendees seemed to come away with the impression that there are important projects they can work on in this space.