Super excited about this! Really grateful for everyone who has worked on this. I'm like 95% confident that I would not have my current role had I not seen the posting for it on the EA Opportunity Board.
If you're a group organizer I would make it a top priority to get the slackbot setup to be posting in one of your slack channels, and to monitor the postings so you can connect your members to opportunities they'd be a good fit for.
Thanks for all the work!
I found it a bit strange that this is the first thing you can filter on:
Was there a lot of user demand for this?
I also found some of the tags surprising: I think some orgs marked as "Part of the EA Community" might not consider themselves such, have you checked with them that they are ok with the categorization?
Good question! To be honest I also thought that filter was a bit odd. Perhaps @michel would like to weigh in?
I could imagine something like: users of the Opportunity Board skew towards people newer to EA, and they wanted a filter like this to better orient themselves within the EA ecosystem.
Note that our team hasn't changed the functionality on the site at all (right now our team only has capacity to keep it running, meaning adding new opportunities, removing old ones, sending out the newsletter, and responding to incoming requests). I think there are many potential UX improvements to the Opportunity Board, which hopefully we'll have capacity to do at some point. (It's still helpful to get feedback now though!)
It's been a few years since I worked on the opportunity board so I don't really remember the decision to add this filter.
It's based on this database of EA orgs, which I haven't kept up to date. (I'm not sure if more recent opportunity board contributors have). I borrowed the language from a similar database Michael A made. Worth noting that both databases were made before or during summer 2022 where EA was much less politicized.
Looking at it now, I also find this filter a bit weird and would probably advise removing it or making sure it's up to date and uses language most organizations would endorse.
Thanks Michel! Our team hasn't been keeping that field up-to-date either, so I've gone ahead and removed the filter from the Opportunity Board, and removed the field from the Orgs page as well. :)
TL;DR: The EA Opportunity Board is back up and running! Check it out here, and subscribe to the bi-weekly newsletter here. It’s now owned by the CEA Online Team.
EA Opportunities is a project aimed at helping people find part-time and volunteer opportunities to build skills or contribute to impactful work. Their core products are the Opportunity Board and the associated bi-weekly newsletter, plus related promos across social media and Slack automations.
It was started and run by students and young professionals for a long time, and has had multiple iterations over the years. The project has been on pause for most of 2024 and the student who was running it no longer has capacity, so the CEA Online Team is taking it over to ensure that it continues to operate.
I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has run this project over the three years that it’s been operating, including Sabrina C, Emma W, @michel, @Jacob Graber, and Varun. From talking with some of them and reading through their docs, I can tell that it means a lot to them, and they have some grand visions for how the project could grow in the future. I’m happy that we are in a position to take on this project on short notice and keep it afloat, and I’m excited for either our team or someone else to push it further in the future.
We plan to spend some time evaluating the project in early 2025. We have some evidence that it has helped people find impactful opportunities and stay motivated to do good, but we do not yet have a clear sense of the cost-effectiveness of running it[1].
We are optimistic enough about it that we will at least keep it running through the end of 2025, but we are not currently committing to owning it in the longer term.
The Online Team runs various other projects, such as this Forum, the EA Newsletter, and effectivealtruism.org. I think the likeliest outcome is for us to prioritize our current projects (which all reach a larger audience) over EA Opportunities, which means we’d continue to run EA Opportunities but at approximately the lowest reasonable cost[2]. It’s also possible that we will feel it’s worth focusing more capacity on the project for a few weeks every once in a while, or that we decide to invest in it more and perhaps even hire an additional person on our team to own it.
We are open to handing the project off to someone who could give it the attention it deserves, as there is a good chance we will decide to prioritize other things. Previous owners of the project have gotten grant money from EAIF to run it. If you’re interested, please email us at [email protected] and we can discuss further. I believe they have been able to run it part-time (up to 15 hrs/wk during the busy season, usually more like 5 hrs/wk).
If you’ve interacted with EA Opportunities, it would help us to hear about your experience (especially if it has concretely helped or harmed you) and any feedback you have. Please feel free to fill out this form (all questions are optional). Thanks!
For example, about a year ago 80K added a collections tab to their job board, which covers a lot of the same use cases as the Opportunity Board does.
Though my guess is that we’d want to at least migrate the website off of the current no-code platform so that we can make some basic UX improvements.
Thank you for taking this on!
This project that was started by motivated university students, sustained by grant funding (thanks Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund! cc @calebp ), and now ultimately absorbed by a proper organization.
I like that arc. I think 'find an organizational home that doesn't depend on one-off grant funding and unusually dedicated/risk-tolerant organizers' is a worthy goal for early-stage project to orient towards. (This can be done either by starting a more mature org on the basis of a good pilot project or joining an org, like the board did here).