https://youtu.be/DxiGVgK08UU?feature=shared Is another talk on the same theme/initiative correct?

Helpful but to disambiguat, that is a directory of professionals who want to do impactful work.

I am also looking to favour “earning to give” professionals willing to do non-impactful work.

Ala my “corporate bake sale” post and @Brad West Introducing the Profit for Good Blog: Transforming Business for Charity 

Eg I was looking for EA/earning to give lawyers and accountants to hire and had trouble finding them

That’s fair. But maybe hold onto the previous database if possible, in case the signup for this one is low and it needs a kickstart?

See the full protocol for this project in our knowledge base here. 

Linking an Unjournal.org evaluation (package here) of one of the papers mentioned in this article.

Akram et al. (2014) subsidized transport in rural villages in Bangladesh, which increased the proportion of households sending a migrant to a city by 30 percentage points.

For example, an RCT by Akram et al. (2014)[21] provided transport subsidies to treated villages in rural Bangladesh, which increased the proportion of households sending a migrant to a city by 30 percentage points (which persisted in follow-up years). While the individuals who moved saw benefits, so did those that remained, as agricultural wages in the treated villages increased by roughly 4-6 percent as more laborers left for the city[21]. By boosting benefits for non-movers, internal migration increases its impacts even further and bolsters the cost-effectiveness calculations.

From our evaluation manager's discussion:

Evidence Action shut down the charity No Lean Season (the precise intervention in this paper) partly because of "Mixed evidence of impact" (see GiveWell's report here).  But the decision was also partly due to particular problems (allegations of fraud and mismanagement by the implementing partner. Thus, we suspected there may still be a strong case that this could be a cost-effective intervention. The present paper reported substantial positive effects, and was heavily cited. Thus we believed it deserved more careful evaluation, and if there were substantial flaws, these should be publicly shared. 

[We only provided one evaluation]... Although we normally seek two or more strong evaluations, we struggled to find evaluators who could provide informed constructive criticism and appraisal. We might have persisted further, however…

After further consultation with an applied researcher in this area, we were advised that the GiveWell’s decision was more about issues having to do with the failure of the program to scale up, rather than its earlier performance as considered in the paper evaluated here. Follow-on work thus seems more relevant for further evaluation, such as “Delegation Risk and Implementation at Scale: Evidence from a Migration Loan Program in Bangladesh” (Mitchell et al, 2023) 

Footnote: Mobarak also wrote a nontechnical comment about the difficulties of scaling up interventions (largely based on his experience here).

Quick update on this:

The Airtable is still up. @Joe Rogero took it over and "it still forms the basis for the Alignment Ecosystem Development site, but the EA side of things is probably obsolete by now."

If someone wants to take over the 'EA side' of this project, perhaps work with me on it, perhaps moving it to Coda.io, let me know.  

Also, we should probably signal boost this a bit so others don't think 'someone else is doing it' (there was some post about 'don't fail quietly' I tried to link here but I can't find it).

I understand the logic, but I think there could be some workarounds that make this doable. If you can put a “last updated “ on profile people can judge for themselves whether the information is rusty.* I would worry a bit that not doing this makes people think “why should I fill in my information on this next thing when I’m just gonna have to do so again when they switch it up next time?

*by the way voice recognition replaced “trustworthy“ with “rusty“ but actually it works as well. :-)

Would it be possible to pass some of the data to the EA Forum thing, perhaps with a simple permission tick box? I? This could help kickstart things a lot building network externalities.

This also seems like a good precedent To me. People will be more likely to participate in these data gathering survey things in the future if they think that if the initiative is retired there is the opportunity to re-purpose it for its successor.