Awesome job, thanks a lot for putting in the effort to make this happen. My biggest concern is that without multiple people willing and able to pump out high quality content on a regular basis the forum won't achieve critical mass. Have you reached out to all the existing EA bloggers to see if they are willing to cross post on an ongoing basis, or at the very least if they object to someone else doing the grunt work and cross posting for them (this could maybe even be automated). This creates the additional problem of fragmented comment threads, but that is a smaller problem.
Thanks!
I agree that it's important to attract contributors. For now, I'm looking to attract bloggers' goodwill while curating content for the first month. Once I've attracted enough seed content, I should be able to start recruiting i) regular contributors and ii) people to use it to promote their local meetups. If people like the site, then the offer becomes more attractive as the site goes up. :)
The Effective Altruism Forum will be launched at effective-altruism.com on September 10, British time.
Now seems like a good time time to discuss why we might need an Effective Altruism Forum, and how it might compare to LessWrong.
About the Effective Altruism Forum
The motivation for the Effective Altruism Forum is to improve the quality of effective altruist discussion and coordination. A big part of this is to give many of the useful features of LessWrong to effective altruists, including:
The Effective Altruism Forum has been designed by Mihai Badic. Over the last month, it has been developed by Trike Apps, who have built the new site using the LessWrong codebase. I'm glad to report that it is now basically ready, looks nice, and is easy to use.
I expect that at the new forum, as on the effective altruist Facebook and Reddit pages, people will want to discuss the which intellectual procedures to use to pick effective actions. I also expect some proposals of effective altruist projects, and offers of resources. So users of the new forum will share LessWrong's interest in instrumental and epistemic rationality. On the other hand, I expect that few of its users will want to discuss the technical aspects of artificial intelligence, anthropics or decision theory, and to the extent that they do so, they will want to do it at LessWrong. As a result, I expect the new forum to cause:
At least initially, the new forum won't have a wiki or a Main/Discussion split and won't have any institutional affiliations.
Next Steps:
It's really important to make sure that the Effective Altruism Forum is established with a beneficial culture. If people want to help that process by writing some seed materials, to be posted around the time of the site's launch, then they can contact me at ry [dot] duff [at] gmail.com. Alternatively, they can wait a short while until they automatically receive posting priveleges.
It's also important that the Effective Altruism Forum helps the shared goals of rationalists and effective altruists, and has net positive effects on LessWrong in particular. Any suggestions for improving the odds of success for the effective altruism forum are most welcome.