Three levels of detail:
THE IMPORTANT PART
A group of volunteers has been working on developing a projects platform for EA, currently titled EA Impact CoLabs, and we would like to announce the release of our 1.0 beta version and request that the EA community begin to join as volunteers and/or post projects in need of assistance. Go to www.impactcolabs.com and join today!
We would love feedback on this current version, including general thoughts or reporting of any bugs/issues. We welcome feedback in the comments below and at our email: [email protected].
We also have plans for a 2.0 version, which we intend to build off an existing open-source solution (HelpWithCovid, which apparently originated from a discussion “between Dustin Moskovitz & Sam Altman”) and need more volunteers ourselves. We anticipate this new version will have significantly more functionality (see below under “Strategies..”), an improved user experience and, ultimately, a higher chance of long-term success. Although we have some particular needs (e.g. Ruby developers) we welcome anyone that is willing to help. If you are interested, please fill out this form or email us, ideally but not necessarily with a brief summary of your skillset, or other background info, at: [email protected].
Finally, if you have any questions not addressed in this post or if you disagree with the concept of a projects platform in principle, please see the Detailed Write-up. It contains a more nuanced and longform exploration of how a projects platform would fit within and benefit the EA community as a whole, an analysis of non-EA solutions that currently are trying to solve this problem in the market, and an in-depth review of each failure mode or challenge plus the potential mitigating strategies.
Below you will find an outline that provides a summarized justification of the platform, an explanation on how we plan to achieve our objectives (including identified risks and challenges) and a final reiteration of our suggested next steps. As mentioned, if you have questions or concerns we suggest reviewing the more detailed write-up, but overall we certainly welcome any and all feedback in the comments below.
JUSTIFICATION OF EA IMPACT COLABS (“Impact CoLabs”)
Significant Problems to be Addressed by Impact CoLabs
Potential Positive Impacts of Impact CoLabs
HOW TO ACHIEVE THE OBJECTIVES OF A PROJECTS PLATFORM
Primary, Quantitative, High Level Objectives
Strategies for Achieving Objectives (in order of probable priority)
Risks and Challenges
NEXT STEPS (+ the ‘ask’)
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
EA Impact CoLabs consists of a dedicated team who have developed the project to date (I mainly just wrote it up) and were instrumental in the development of this post, including (alphabetically) Edo Arad, Yonatan Cale, Tomer Eldor, Charles Escalante, Gidon Kadosh, Jatin Kansal, Naomi Nederlof, and Sam Nolan. In addition, many others have provided critical input on the project and/or on this post including Catherine Low, Aaron Gertler, Vaidehi Agarwalla, Victor Yunenko, Aman Patel, Tinnei Pang, Radu Spineanu, and Harry K Ng.
Just a quick update on this project (8 Oct 2023):
We decided to close the project in 2022 for two main reasons:
We also found many difficulties around project vetting, volunteer management and upkeep that made it a hard initiative to continue. Many of us still strongly believe more entrepreneurship within the EA community would be beneficial and that something like this metaproject would be very helpful. I am eager to discuss new metaprojects like this with anyone that wants to try to launch one and to communicate further leassons learned.
This failure mode seemed similar in nature to this listed mistake on the CEA website. Specifically:
We think we should have taken on fewer new projects, set clearer expectations for them, and ended unsuccessful projects earlier.
Running this wide array of projects has sometimes resulted in a lack of organizational focus, poor execution, and a lack of follow-through. It also meant that we were staking a claim on projects that might otherwise have been taken on by other individuals or groups that could have done a better job than we were doing (for example, by funding good projects that we were slow to fund).
OTOH, it may not have caused harm in this case if 1) or others were sufficient reasons to close the project without 2), or if this wasn't a project that could have been done better than CEA.
I'd like to discuss a similar "metaproject" I have in the works. Currently my goal for a "minimum viable product" is just the list, with volunteer matching added later if it works, but also including smaller "quick win" projects and immediate contributions that could be made. Would you be willing to share further and discuss lessons learned on this one?
Feedback on this post: I did not understand what CoLabs was after reading the 1-minute snapshot; I had to read aways into the outline and click through to the site to understand what the product is. I think you assume your target audience knows what a “projects platform” is without needing it defined, but it took me a while to understand what that meant.
Thank you for the feedback! You found a blindspot that most of us at Impact CoLabs and those we asked to review this post had, namely that we all had a concept in our mind for what a project platform was. I have adjusted the snapshot to hopefully aid in explaining the concept in general, but please let me know if this still doesn't address your issue.
This sounds like really valuable project!
I’ve been thinking about helping to set up some sort of EA incubator ecosystem. My contribution could be to collect, organize, prioritize, and roadmap all the project ideas that are floating around. I’d apply some sort of process along the lines of that of Charity Entrepreneurship but with a much more longtermist focus. I’ve been envisioning this in the form of a wiki with a lot of stub articles for project ideas that didn’t pass the shallow review phase and a few comprehensive articles that compile (1) detailed thinking on robustness, importance, tractability, etc.; (2) notes from interviews with domain experts; (3) a roadmap for how the project might be realized; (4) descriptions of the sorts of skills and resources it will require; (4) talent, funding, and other buy-in that is maybe already interested; (5) a comment section for discussions. (Jan’s process could be part of this too.) Since this would take the format of a wiki, I could easily add other editors to contribute to it too. I wouldn’t make it fully publicly editable though. Ideally, there’d also be a forum post for each top project that is automatically updated when the wiki changes and whose comments are displayed on the wiki page too.
My main worry is that the final product will just collect dust until it is hopelessly outdated.
So I’ve been wondering whether there are maybe synergies here, e.g., along the lines where I do the above, and your platform can in the end reduce the risk that nothing ever comes of the top project ideas?
I’ve only spot-checked a few of your current projects, but it seems to me that they typically have project owners whereas my projects would typically start out with no one doing them and at max. vague buy-in of the sort “People X and Y are tentatively interested in funding such a project, and person Z has considered starting this project but is now working on something else because they couldn’t find a cofounder.” Do you think that would be a critical problem?
Hi Denis, thank you for your message and your offer to contribute, it is welcome. Since we are just starting out we still haven't built all the capabilities we have envisioned. For example, and as mentioned above, we were planning a list of tractable problems and project ideas to guide potential project leaders, as well as a list of past/failed projects or lessons learned from projects to ensure the community as a whole is not just spinning its wheels (e.g. this metaproject has had similar iterations in the past..). But your idea for a wiki that not only provides problem areas and project ideas but also provides thought-through analyses, roadmaps, required skills lists, available resources and community input is a huge improvement over our current plan. So I don't think the issue of not having project leaders identified upfront would be a critical problem, as long as you're OK with your wiki being separate from the project database. Ideally entrepreneurial EAs will find your project write-ups on Impact CoLabs and then create a project from it (or people that are screened from the platform due to low-impact ideas can be directed to those pre-vetted ideas).
We definitely want the ultimate version of Impact CoLabs to be the central node for project creation, and we want the resources we provide to reflect that. The goal is to be a more high-volume/low-touch, top-of-the-funnel solution than the incubators/accelerators like Charity Entrepreneurship or other upcoming startup factories. But even if we are not going to shepherd projects personally and diligently, it doesn't mean we can't try to provide as detailed and well-researched guidance as possible.
My only slight hesitation for your approach is the effort involved in development and upkeep, we would rather offer a lower-value solution (just a list of ideas) that we can guarantee can be maintained than a higher-value solution (detailed wiki with required fields for each project idea) that has a large chance of being abandoned after a while. So it all depends on volunteer interest in contributing and/or how we set it up. Would love to chat about this more. If you want to take this offline we would recommend filling out our new team member form so we can get you more background info on the project, or alternatively you can just email [email protected].
Hi Mats! That sounds splendid!
Meanwhile I’ve set up my wiki, started thinking about the structure of the template I’d like to use for the project pages, and have started reading up on your Google Docs. It’s impressive how thoroughly you’ve already evaluated your project concept!
My “idea foundry” project itself will have its own page in its wiki with more information on my future plans. That’ll make it easier to reflect on whether the whole thing is sustainable. I haven’t thought about it sufficiently myself. I’ll only publish individual pages once I have proofread them for possible info hazards and have gotten feedback from some trusted friends too.
… as well as a list of past/failed projects or lessons learned from projects
Yeah, and there are also a lot of ostensibly brilliant project ideas in various lists that I think are subtly deleterious. No one has attempted to realize them yet (at least the ones I vaguely recall and to my knowledge) but a project database with just a bit more detailed thinking may help to keep it that way. (Or else may inspire someone to come up with a way to realize the project in a way that avoids the subtly deleterious bits.)
… as long as you're OK with your wiki being separate from the project database
Totally. It feels like so far I’ve been wholly unconvinced by some 95+% of project ideas I’ve read about, so those should not end up on your platform. It would just be valuable – or essential – to be able to promote the top of the shortlist to potential founders.
My only slight hesitation for your approach is the effort involved in development and upkeep, we would rather offer a lower-value solution (just a list of ideas) that we can guarantee can be maintained than a higher-value solution (detailed wiki with required fields for each project idea) that has a large chance of being abandoned after a while.
I’m worried about that too. I’d be willing to risk it, pending further thinking. An alleviating factor is that the detailed reviews would be reserved for a small shortlist of projects. Most of them would just get a quick stub summary and the reason why I didn’t prioritize them.
I’ve read that you’re perfectly open to (for-profit) social enterprises and of course early-stage project in need of cofounders. But I see the term “volunteer” a lot in the materials. It has these particular associations with low commitment, low responsibility, no salary, nonprofits, etc. Is it the best synonym for the job? None of the alternatives I can think of is quite broad enough either – cofounder, collaborator, partner, talent, … – but I imagine that such word choices can influence what the platform will end up being used for. A platform for “cofounder matching” may end up being used for more high-value work than one for “volunteer matching,” maybe some sort of “Task Y” notwithstanding. But I’ve also heard that someone had the impression that cofounder matching is not a current bottleneck, which I found surprising.
I’ll get in touch through one of the channels you recommended.
Thank you for the kind words and the great feedback! You make a great point about 'volunteering', we will discuss that internally. I'm generally in agreement with your comments but would love to explore some of the nuance! Look forward to hearing form you, if you reach out and don't hear back, please message me here to make sure we are being responsive.
Thank you Mats for posting this, this is exciting!
Hey everyone, I'll update that we (Impact CoLabs) would be helped by volunteers in:
1. Matching people & projects, and managing user communication in general
2. Evaluating projects (vetting if they should be accepted or not)
3. Developers - especially ruby on rails, to develop the better and more automated version 2.0.
If you're interested please let us know :) [email protected]
It's good to see a new enthusiastic team working on this! My impression, based on working on the problem ~2 years ago is this has good chances to provide value in global health a poverty, animal suffering, or parts of meta- cause areas; in case of x-risk focused projects, something like a 'project platform' seems almost purely bottlenecked by vetting. In the current proposal this seems to mostly depend on "Evaluation Commission"-> as a result, the most important part for x-risk projects seems judgement of members of this commission and/or it's ability to seek external vetting
Thanks Jan! Yes, we even reference your post in our detailed write-up and agree that vetting will be critical and a bottle-neck to maximum positive impact, particularly related to x-risk. Currently we have implemented a plan that we believe is manageable exclusively by a small group of volunteers, and have included a step in the process that involves CEA's Community Health team. Having said that, we don't think that is an ideal stopping point, we hope to expand into other forms of vetting pending general interest in the project, vetting volunteer interest and the building of other functionality or establishment of partnership with outside orgs. You can read more in sections IV.9 and VI.11 of the write-up about our thinking on these topics. Lastly, given your fantastic analysis in the past, if you would like to help out we would welcome any new team members that are interested in or familiar with this metaproject -- you can email [email protected] anytime!