Funding is a mess. 

Distributing money is hard and we should not expect to have a good solution anytime soon. But it would be helpful if people where aware of how inadequate our current funding ecosystem is. Even though money supposedly exists, funding is still the main bottleneck for most new EA initiatives.

My current analysis is that grant evaluation is hard becasue is inherently low bandwidth. I would therefore recommend that people donate though their own personal networks rather than giving to one of the EA Funds. I'd also expect that we'll see a greater and healthier diversity of projects this way.

I know the argument for having centralized funding. We pool all the money and all the applications in one place, and then let some trusted people sort it out. In theory this both saves time and optimize money distribution. But in practice it has a lot of problems. It's slow, it's low bandwidth, and the biases of a few will effect everyone.

I've personally lost a lot of time to grant agencies. Waiting for answers what where late. Or waiting for a promised application opening, that where canceled. If you have not experienced these things yourself, it's hard for me to describe how much it can mess up everything. And that's just one of the problems. 

Dealing with individual funders has been sooooo much easier, and just overall a much nicer and more supportive experience. 

I have a lot more to say about this, but I have not found the best way to express it yet. But feel free to reach out for more of my thoughts. 

(An alternative hypotheses, is that EA is cash constrained. I.e. the bottle neck is not around distributing the money, it's about there not being enough of it. In that case we should upgrade the importance of earning to give.)

Volunteer pipeline.

A good answer to What to do with people. A system where it is easy to direct newcomers to potential relevant projects in EA globally.

The cycle of people coming up with ideas about how to organise people into projects, or prevent redundant posts, or make the Forum more accretive, being forgotten a week later. i.e. We fail to coordinate on coordination projects.

Keeping people up-to-date.

I observe that a lot of people are still active and motivated in their problem area but seem to still associate EA with the sort of ideas that were associated with it around 2014, some of which are long since regarded as mistaken or oversimplified. (I’m not talking about people who drifted away from EA but rather ones for who new EA-related insights are still very action-relevant.)

There are surely a lot of things like the EA newsletter already going on that keep people up-to-date, but maybe there are more ideas that can be tried.

Mentoring.

I remember Chi mentioned how well mentoring worked at Oxford. I’ve observed a number of EA efforts to get mentoring off the ground through better coordination, and I also replied to her comment with some ideas.

A global "CRM".

It might be useful to have a global table of contact people who are sympathetic to the EA community and can offer help in their expertise or their position. Such a system can not demand too much out of any contact person, so some coordination there is needed.

Search engine optimization.

Based on my very limited understanding, links are critical for SEO (though not as important as a few years ago). So conventions like “EA blogs should generally have blogrolls (i.e. lists of links to related blogs)” or “references to organizations (e.g AMF) on the EA Forum should generally link to them” would probably help the entire community.

Salius posted a list of potential projects. One (three, actually) relevant suggested project is about coordinating research activities - link to doc.

Tool support for groups and individuals. 

Some tools for productivity / project management might be bought with a bulk discount for hundreds of people at a time. Some tools might be developed or customized.

For example, we in EA Israel are working on improving our Airtable HR system. We are in the process of getting a charity discount and in customizing automations for the system. We will naturally share here it when we will have some more experience with it, but perhaps a concentrated effort on a general tool like this for any local group might have been more worthwhile.

Also, personal productivity tools like Complice might be worth buying at a bulk discount (I was in contact with Complice, and they seem open to that if it will be for enough people, but I didn't follow through).  

"Moral Career Trade"

If people generally work on what their best at, even if that's not their favorite cause, as a community we might be able to do the most good. A sample project-

1. Find people whose skills are best suited for one cause area but they care most about another. Match them to see if they can agree to each work on the other’s favorite cause.
2. E.g, a CS PhD who cares mostly about farmed animal welfare and a Biology PhD who cares mostly about AI Safety can trade and each work in their own profession in the other’s field.