It looks and sounds like the event was a great success ! Im really happy about that :)

Could you provide some more info about the applicants and the admissions process/decisions? e.g.:

• how many attendees had you planned on admitting ?
• if you had more budget, would you have admitted more attendees?
• were all 170 attendees of the quality that you'd have hoped for, or was there some relaxation of admission criteria passed a certain number of admissions?
• were you surprised at how many applicants there were?
• Do you have a sense of what the general applicant pool was like ? e.g. how many applicants were very familiar with EA vs new to EA? ; where did applicants hear about the event? ; were there any notable characteristics shared by a majority of applicants ? etc.

Haven't read the full report but I would hazard to guess that they're using the word long-termism to mean something quite different to what we think about when we talk about longtermism.

It's very common for people to ask for (and receive) feedback on drafts. Search "Feedback" and you'll find examples of how people have done that, and you should be fine

What types of requests ? Like feature updates to the forum, or seeking help from other forum users on projects ?

Got me teary eyed whilst reading the forum. wow. thank you.

I feel like the title should be more specific ? e.g. it should reference china, given the content of the post?

Hi SShaikh, thanks for following the stuff I've written about this, and thanks for the comment. Some of what I want to explain will be contained in a long/formal report I'm writing on this topic. however, a couple of points in response: 

That said, I don't think that plugging Zakat into an EA framework is possible. I haven't seen any serious Muslim scholar support using Zakat funds to avoid global catastrophic risks or future pandemics.

1. I think you're mistaken in thinking that because zakat and longtermist projects aren't compatible (which I think is true), that zakat isn't compatible with EA. I think there is ample support for the possibility of zakat being used for global health interventions, which is historically and presently something EAs spend a lot of time working on. For me, "zakat being compatible with EA" means "its possible to increase the impact of zakat and allocate it in the most cost-effective way" and I think this has to  be possible given the state of inefficiency in the way zakat is collected and distributed.

But I'm unsure how your group would conduct this work more effectively than popular charities like Islamic Relief or Helping Hand. 

2. I'd be pretty surprised if Islamic Relief or Helping Hand are most cost effective than GiveDirectly. So perhaps the least impactful marginal improvement in zakat allocation would be getting people to shift from Islamic Relief or Helping Hands to GiveDirectly, provided GD establishes a zakat-compliant program like they've done in the past. Hopefully it will also be possible to get people to shift to zakat-compliant effective charities (e.g. hopefully something like Spiro or New Incentives) where they'd be increasing the counterfactual impact of each dollar by an order of magnitude. So even if only a fraction of current donors to IR or HH end up making this change, the EV difference between the two situations would still make it worth it to try and convince the small number of donors open to changing. 
 

I have two alternative recommendations for your proposed group (and for any Muslim in EA): 

1. Invite Muslims to EA: We can advise Muslims to donate to EA charities for the same reason that others do: to do the most good. It won't count towards their obligatory Zakat, but it will count as voluntary Sadaqah. We ought to convince Muslims that giving 2.5% annually is a very low baseline and we should do more! 

3.1  I think this is a good suggestion, but it's not an alternative suggestion. We can try to grow the Muslim EA community (as Muslims for EA, Muslim Network for Positive Impact, and Muslim Impact Lab have been trying to do), at the same time as encouraging Muslims to maximise the impact of their sadaqah through regular effective giving orgs like GWWC or Afterfund, AND build infrastructure to meet the unique demands of zakat. 
 

Lobby Muslim charities to be better: You say there's no accountability / transparency demonstrated by the most popular Zakat-collection and distribution groups. Perhaps your group can write on what specific action / information is missing, why this is a problem worth addressing, and how these charities can do so. 

3.2. Again, this is something I'd want to do as part of this project. It's not clear yet whether or not the best path to impact would be to first e.g. a) get existing effective orgs to become zakat-compliant, b) get already-zakat-compliant orgs to become more cost effective, c) create a zakat-complaint org which collects donations and distributes them to cost effective orgs, d) create an org which only convinces and promotes effective zakat and then directs people to those orgs without collecting zakat ourselves. 

didn't pan out, unfortunately

lol I am one of the people who (maybe narrowly?) missed out on the incubation program. Yeah I have emailed them about hopefully people connected with any promising collaborators.

Thanks for the encouragement and the ideas :)

I haven't done any enough research to know how much this would affect the estimates but I do want to point out that zakat is calculated on wealth, and wealth is not the same thing as GDP (maybe you're already aware of this and think that GDP is a good enough proxy to estimate wealth).