A recent discussion here suggested that communication and coordination about the EA projects that are happening or being considered could be improved, and that many people weren't aware of .impact's providing a venue for this. With this in mind, I thought we'd start posting the notes from its monthly project update meetings on Google Hangouts.

Here are the notes from the last meeting. They're scrappy and partial, and largely consist of the original agenda, but do give a decent sense of the most major progress and new ideas. All previous notes can be found here, as can the agenda for the next meeting - which is happening this Sunday, and to which anyone's very welcome! It's at 9pm UTC (2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 9pm London) and a Google Hangouts link to join will be posted in the Facebook event at that time.

15 Feb 2015 Projects Update Meeting

Participants

• Tom Ash, Vancouver, Charity Science
• Matthieu Tanguay-Carel
• Kyle Scott, CEA
• Rochelle Harris
• Samuel Hilton, London
• Randy Carlton, Boston-based, Charity.is/Commonwealth Market
• Haseeb Qureshi
• Ozzie Gooen
• Patrick Brinich-Langlois

Project Updates

.meta 

Updates

• Tom made some edits to .impact’s form for people interested in EA projects or volunteering at http://dotimpact.im/join.html - what are people’s thoughts?
  • Main changes (some minor ones)
    • Attempting to gauge how likely people are to do work
      • In intro text said "Please be conservative when giving your answers, as past experience suggests that it’s easy to overestimate how likely you are to volunteer. We’d love to hear from you if you’re potentially interested in this though, even if you decide there’s a good chance you won’t end up volunteering!"
      • Replaced "How interested are you?" with "Being conservative, how likely are you to work on a project?", including the following options:
        • I’m interested, but it’s quite unlikely (<25%) that I’ll end up doing so
        • I’m interested, but it’s somewhat unlikely (25-50%) that I’ll end up doing so
    • Asked "Are you interested in volunteering on an existing project or starting your own?"
• Tom discussed EA Outreach contacting people who submit this and they’d like to do so. They suggested a few small changes which he made.

Discussion

• What do people think of these changes?
  • They might seem unwelcoming. But the rationale is that there’s ample experience across many EA organizations that many people who express interest in volunteering don’t end up doing much (plausibly due to the overestimation mentioned), and it’s helpful for anyone contacting them to have probed this.
• How should we make people who might like to get involved in EA volunteering aware of the form and .impact in general?

Small EA task suggester

Description

• New project
• Description from Sam
  • Target audience:
    • - Ever got a min with not much to do?
    • - Do you ever feel that the EA community spends too much time talking and not enough time acting?
    • - Have you never volunteered you time but want to put time into effective actions without too much commitment?
    • - Want to do something effective with your time but do not know what?
  • Me and Jacob have written a little app/web page aimed to help and to encourage EA volunteering. See:http://www1.maths.leeds.ac.uk/~mmjhh/stuff/findmeatask/
  • Instructions: Click to say how much time you have. Get a task. If you do not like it click find me another task. Choose to do a task. Start timer. Do as much as you can before the time finishes. Get points!!
  • Then post thoughts below.
  • This is a very early minimum viable product beta test version. What I am keen to know is:
    • - Do you think we should put more time into this?
    • - Would you use this? Regularly?
    • - What features does it need for you to use this?
• Original FB thread: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/809561952433497/

Discussion

• Kyle: would be ideal to have someone processing people who wanted to volunteer
• Tom: there are different types of tasks, including ones people can do without management (easy wins that we just want to promote), which this is particular useful to launch
• Tom: when do you plan to launch?
  • Sam: not planned yet
• Haseeb: have option to see all the tasks
• Kyle: Maybe a voting system for tasks?
• Feedback
  • Easy view of list of all the tasks
  • Make it customisable
  • Can rate tasks - may effect if task appears
  • Urgency sorting - may effect if task appears
  • Add to google canedar
  • A notification or google group that adds to the tasks
  • maybe make it look nicer
• The list of task is more important than functionality
• Can let people use trello to vote on tasks
• Platform for listing tasks
  • trello
    • has a star function (ask Ollie)
•  Ozzie: open source?
  • AP Sam: ask Jacob to do that on github
• Kyle: I googled and found this: http://dharmafly.com/tasket
• Sam: Poll on people’s thoughts
  • Release something simple soon
    • Tom 
    • Ozzie Gooen
    • Randy - Likes the Trello site to start. I wish Asana was free for large groups so we could create/copy project templates.
    • Kyle

Marketing cost-effective poverty charities to religious people

• Some planning and progress on this, to be described

EA Forum

Updates

• Wrote up description of tasks for Patrick, could use some help on this
• Sam has some feedback / suggested improvements for EA forum
  • Integration with the wiki
  • Sam never really lists London events on the forum, it’s just an extra hassle, would be easier if you could input a recurring event
    • or even if events automatically listed following posts on fb / meetup

EA Donation Registry

Updates

• Not going to integrate with MyGiving after all
  • Tom had a long correspondence about this with Steph Crampin
    • AP T: forward to Michelle
• Preferred solution is to add the checkbox saying "Make my donations public on the EA Donation Registry", which Tom already coded up for GWWC and sent to them having discussed it, but which they’re now not pasting in

EA Reading Group

• Meeting next week, Sunday at 9pm UTC. Discussing Carnegie’s "How to Win Friends and Influence People" (easy read).
• Almost 100% ported to the Goodreads group, facebook will still have events for awhile
• Got a bunch of new people from Goodreads, 33 total
• Matthieu Tanguay-Carel has stepped up to help manage the group, thanks so much!
• General congratulation
• Matt: Join and vote on the next books! https://www.goodreads.com/poll/list/151274-effective-altruists?type=group

EA survey data analysis

Updates

• Should be published next weekend

• Outside view says this target won’t actually happen

• Has Peter tried to get suggestions for possible restricted early distribution from Greg?
  • Asked, but not answered (update: now answered)

• Kyle: Are we going to address the selection bias thing?
  • Yes, Peter has a really long appendix about it

Non-English language EA outreach 

• Pablo is thinking of doing this online and seeking feedback at https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/823288501060842/

Shop for Charity 

• Jacob Hilton kindly built the Chrome extension suggested by Samuel Hilton 
• Shane Stranahan volunteered to build versions for FF/Safari, not IE
  • Anyone have experience of this?
  • Shane: should be ready tonight!
• Will give S4C a proper push given the successful initial experiment

Regular EA Digest 

• Giles Edkins’ idea
• Ryan Carey’s suggestion: "MVP: You could presumably hook reddit.com/r/smartgiving with IFTTT (if this then that) to use it to send a weekly digest."
• Tom Ash: I’ve just done this, you can sign up at http://eepurl.com/bej8LT 
• Will announce soon (update: now superseded by Evan's weekly updates email, so retiring in favour of this) 

Expand Tax Deductibility for Top Charities

• Some progress on Norway
• Tom talked to people about arranging a tax-deductible US donations route that EA orgs can use for their US fundraising, looks like this is happening!
• Randy described plan. To begin with, we’d be more focus on making sure we provided a good way to give for EAs. Later, we may try to draw in others. Here’s a presentation that I’ve given to traditional donors and funders to start getting them toward more effective giving. The Need Map of the world is where we start getting people really rethinking how/where they are giving especially if you overlay this map with where you get your biggest bang for your buck.
• Ozzie mentioned the long term future DAF Patrick recently set up with Vanguard
  • From Randy: I’m having trouble finding the exact tax code, but my impression is that an individual will not be able to receive a tax write off when contribution to another persons DAF. Here’s a bit more info of interest from the IRS.  This statement is concerning to me (and means the donor would need to be named on the DAF account to receive a valid tax write-off): Contributions to Donor-Advised Funds: You cannot deduct a contribution to a donor-advised fund if: You do not have an acknowledgment from that sponsoring organization that it has exclusive legal control over the assets contributed.
• Rochelle is in a good place with social enterprise networks in the UK - feel free to let me know if this can be useful

Fermi Estimate Tool

• http://lesswrong.com/r/lesswrong/lw/lhf/graphical_assumption_modeling/
• https://github.com/OAGr/fermi-backend
• 
• Shane: plans?
  • Ozzie: open source, at least for now, maybe paid later

 

Skillshare.im

• Still getting offers
• Anyone want to work on? (rails experience)
  • Haseeb: I’m currently teaching myself Ruby and plan to learn Rails soon, and I’d like to eventually contribute to Skillshare, but I assume it’ll take a while before I’ll be of any use (?)
    • AP Tom: start email conv with Haseeb, Ozzie and Patrick giving them each others emails

Website for sharing ideas and matching people in teams

• Tor described
• Was discussed

Free Discussion

Radical Givers Proposal

• Questions
  • 1/3 requirement?
    • What about ppl who dont meet it?
      • If you are making below 150% of median income, then we encourage you to give a nominal amount (probably 1%), just to keep yourself in the habit of giving. - will these ppl be members in some sense?
  • thoughts on name?
    • more descriptive name, such as etg or a variant?
    • Randy: I think the name is good enough, and I actually like it and easily identifiable.
• Log
  • Current plan is to use a plain text logo rather than a designed one (ones were mocked up at https://99designs.co.uk/logo-design/contests/awesome-design-altruistic-nonprofit-radical-givers-where-love-452659/poll/ypcxah?utm_source=voting_app&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=voting )
• There was a long discussion of this