Thanks! We link to the EA forum and Facebook group for discussion as it makes sense to concentrate discussion in a few venues rather than creating a new place for it, for its own sake. The EA forum's been quite active so far, and the Facebook group recently passed 4,000 members, and seems to have had several threads a day for over a year. (It's the most successful analogous Facebook group I know of - does anyone know of others, and what features they have?)
The only obvious connection that I can see between a profiles base (of the sort initially outlined in this .impact needs analysis) - and the various other applications of personal data, like the donation registry and map - and a forum is providing more information about the people who post on the latter. But this can be achieved by providing links next to people's names on both sites, and I've already set this up on the EA Profiles and Ryan Carey will do it on the forum.
Does that sound sensible? Can anyone else think of other helpful integrations or synergies?
People may also be interested in Ozzie Gooen's discussion document on the Advantages and Disadvantages of a Monolith Application. I'm conscious of the disadvantages, and am a believer in decentralisation.
As Niel Bowerman commented there, profiles bases sometime do evolve into monoliths. The ever-growing list of things you can do on Facebook is an example, although that's partly because Facebook is a platform for independent applications; in the same way, people can build independent applications either on top of the Profiles or leveraging them somewhere else, through .impact.
We’re excited to announce EA Profiles, a new community platform for effective altruists. There are already hundreds of profiles for you to browse from members of the community such as Peter Singer and Jeff Kaufman, full of interesting information like people’s favoured causes and charities, and the actions they’re taking to make the world a better place. And you can create your own right now!
The Profiles should serve as a virtual “Who’s Who” of EA - a place to see information about those who identify with effective altruism, and share what we’re doing to inspire and motivate others. They enable applications such as a map of EAs and a cause-neutral registry of past and planned donations, which we'll cover in a separate announcement.
Your EA Profile provides a natural, standard way to share your identification with the ideas of effective altruism and the ways in which you and people you know can do enormous amounts of good, from spreading these ideas to donating to highly efficient charities. We know that people can be slow or cautious about sharing this, but for familiar reasons think that doing so is highly valuable, spreading and normalising a focus on effectiveness and high impact donations. And making a Profile is a great excuse to do so: you’re sharing this information because we asked for it! You can then point people to it, potentially triggering interesting conversations with friends who might like to hear about the ways they can do the most good.
Many of the Profiles come from answers which people opted to make public in the first annual survey of effective altruists this year (still open if you haven’t taken it yet - it provides another way to create a full or partial Profile). Peter Hurford is currently working on analysing the survey results and will share them and the raw data from the survey soon, but for now the EA Profiles provide some of the most interesting results: public information on the inspiring actions that individuals are taking.
If you’re interested in building up this project, or working on other similar projects, consider looking into .impact, a coordinated volunteer force working on potentially high-impact projects like this one.