We’re happy to announce that the new EA Hub has launched. Our vision is to enable and inspire collaboration between EAs by making it easier for people to network, and work together on promising initiatives.
Connecting ideas with talent, resources and support is one of the biggest bottlenecks of high potential individuals and a cause of promising ideas not reaching fruition. By synchronising and showcasing projects, individuals, and groups, initiatives can build traction more effectively. The platform also links to other resources and platforms in the EA space, including the Effective Altruism Forum.
Over the last year, we’ve redesigned and rebuilt the Hub from scratch, with the help of dedicated and talented volunteers. In this release, we restore and improve most of the functionality from the original EA Hub. It includes:
- The ability to search for people (in the near future also based on cause area, skillset, job status, organisational affiliation, and availability for volunteer roles or speaking engagements).
- The capability to join or register a local group, to contact a group, to ‘claim’ a group, and to report a group inactive.
- The map of EAs, highlighting EA groups and personal profiles. The map now distinguishes between active and inactive groups.
- Customisable personal profiles.
Future Features
In the coming months, we will be building a feature for coordinating EA projects, and a cross-platform search functionality.
We anticipate the ‘Projects’ feature will offer an inventory of EA projects of all sizes, the option to express interest in an initiative, and enable project leads to signal opportunities for funding, volunteering, paid work, or partnership. Projects will be integrated into the map of EAs, and users will be able to display project roles on their profiles.
Our cross-platform search functionality will draw together results from relevant sources of information we use as a community. Doing this will consolidate existing resources, lower the navigation cost for users and multiply the impact of our collective work. As the product matures, we will take our cue from users when fine-tuning our functionality and future features.
The Hub will also serve to collate data on groups and movement trends year round, allowing records to be more seamlessly maintained. This should benefit group organisers, enabling them to track group metrics more easily. EA Survey data will also be integrated into the platform—we hope to offer data visualisations that will enable individuals and organisations outside of Rethink Charity to review and utilise longitudinal community research more easily.
In keeping with our ethos, we want to collaborate with other EA projects as much as possible. The Hub presently connects with the EA Forum, EA Work Club, PriorityWiki, EA Donation Swap and Effective Thesis. We expect to expand this list in the future, and we are very open to integrating relevant projects where mutually desirable.
Acknowledgements
Originally created by .impact in 2014, the new EA Hub has been delivered by LEAN, a project of Rethink Charity. As with the original website, EA Hub 2.0 has been created on a relatively small budget thanks to our generous donors and the efforts of our talented staff and volunteers:
Taymon Beal
Sebastian Becker
Alexander Herwix
Richenda Herzig
Marcin Kowrygo
Manoj Nathwani
Michal Trzesimiech
Nadia Williams
We’d also like to acknowledge the input of David Moss, Luke Freeman, Ozzie Gooen, Peter Hurford, Sarah Spikes, Katie Glass, David Furlong, and the Rethink Charity team.
If you’re as keen as we are to see the Hub reach its potential, the project has considerable room for funding, and we also welcome volunteers with software engineering experience. The Hub is open source and our repository can be found here.
To discuss ideas and collaboration, we suggest joining #rc-team-hub-public. You can also leave your feedback here.
If you’d like to keep an eye on new features, register your account and tick the box that allows us to send you our updates. If you have general questions about the Hub, reply below or send an email to lean@eahub.org.
I'm not sure much integration would be required, but did you consider linking the 80k jobs board? This seems like a really useful recent EA tool that could fit in quite well.
Sure, linking to it sounds like a fantastic idea! We prioritised this for our next release: https://github.com/rtcharity/eahub.org/issues/571
Congratulations on the launch!
Can anyone think of good places to link EA Hub from now that it's been revamped? I'm worried that people will forget about it in a few weeks once this post falls off the EA Forum homepage.
One strategy: Brainstorm use cases, then figure out where people are currently going for those use cases, then put links to the EA Hub in those places with an explanation of how EA Hub solves the use case. For example (rot13'd so you can think of your own before being primed by mine), one possible use case is crbcyr zrrgvat sryybj RNf juvyr geniryvat. Fb jr pbhyq qebc n yvax gb gur RN Uho va gur RN Pbhpufhesvat Snprobbx tebhc qrfpevcgvba naq fhttrfg gung crbcyr svaq ybpny tebhcf be fraq crefbany zrffntrf gb ybpny RNf vaivgvat gurz sbe pbssrr juvyr geniryvat. (Nffhzvat gung'f pbafvqrerq na npprcgnoyr hfr bs gur crefbany zrffntr srngher—V qba'g frr jul vg jbhyqa'g or gubhtu.)
I agree that we need some engagement loop/clear use case to keep this going. Could we host the annual survey on the hub? Or base some of the responses on the hub index? That could both lead more people to visit and register on the hub and also reduce the effort to fill the survey. It might also help us collect more accurate information in some aspects, for example with reference to membership numbers.
Historically it has flowed the opposite direction - the Survey has been an exceptional way to get people to populate data on the Hub.
Thanks for raising this! We're very interested in learning about the features you find exceptionally attractive in this sense. We use this to help us keep track of such ideas: https://feedback.eahub.org/. There's also a roadmap here that represents a few of our best guesses: https://eahub.org/about/.
I think what will get people using the platform is if it offer some useful feature that isn't available on minimal effort groups (like facebook). For example, once EA platforms is set up I can envision that drawing people in on its own and engaging.
I quite like your idea and i'd even be down for a "open to meeting/hosting" button or something like that. one reservation I would have is that how professional/work oriented the Hub wants to be, and whether reaching out to people for more social reasons might be better left to social platform like facebook.
I'm glad it's back up - I find it useful for connecting with EAs when I travel. Do you have a record of number of people registered over time? Could you please add the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) to the list of Organisational Affiliations?
We do have the registration dates. We'll look into making that into a report for you (https://github.com/rtcharity/eahub.org/issues/595).
Sure, thank you for asking (https://github.com/rtcharity/eahub.org/issues/592)!
(on phone so don't judge my style :p) Nice work! Thanks for all of your time and effort.
Some quick thoughts. It might be good to post about the new hub in all of the groups you have listed. When doing that you could ask the members to add their details and check/update their group details.
Would be great to be able to bulk message all profiles in a given area (perhaps it should require contracting an admin to avoid spamming), for example in relation to upcoming local conferences or big events.
It could be good to ask new signups if they know any groups that are missing. Also when promoting the new. I see that there are a few missing in Australia, like Newcastle, Cairns Wollongong and Tasmania. If easy/sensible please bring back the map features for profiles. It would be really useful to be able to find the EAs in a postcode etc.
Thanks again :)
Thanks, Peter! We're still spreading the news of the launch. We use several channels and get a very warm response, which is wonderful!
About the accuracy of the data on personal profiles, we've emailed all of our user base asking to update and activate their profiles (all 4000+ of our users will remain hidden before that takes place). We're confident that the number of people that join us will grow steadily as we add features (you can read about our plans in here https://eahub.org/about/).
The accuracy of the data on local groups will be assured by comparing it against the data we get from the Local Groups Survey. We work with a dedicated team at the Centre for Effective Altruism to make sure the data is clean day-to-day. We also trust that some of this responsibility will be taken from us by the Organizers. We will aim to make that easier for everyone with every future release.
I like your idea of enabling bulk messages and I posted it here https://feedback.eahub.org/. Everyone can add their own ideas or vote on those that are already here. We will treat the results very seriously when prioritising.
New idea! It could be useful to ask members to fill out much of the information contained in the EA survey. And indicate which local groups they attend. Not mandatory of course. It might also be useful to ping local leads if a new person registers and indicates that they haven't attended a local group event.
Thanks! We previously had an option for people taking the EA Survey to opt-in to be informed if there was a nearby local group/put in contact with the organiser. We'll definitely consider including this in future surveys. Allowing people to indicate specifically which local group they attend also sounds potentially useful.
This is amazing. Great work for everyone who inputted. Was thinking that a possible future features (although perhaps not a priority) would be integration to the EA funds donation tracking and maybe LinkedIn profile data.
Thanks! I added both of your ideas here: https://feedback.eahub.org/. Integrating our profiles with LinkedIn sounds like a low hanging fruit, so I just prioritized it for the June release: https://github.com/rtcharity/eahub.org/issues/598.
One thing I have noticed is it is difficult to find EA's with specific skills who may be willing to offer their advice or services on the EA Hub. There is no way to filter member profiles by cause areas, availability to volunteer, or expertise, only by name and geographic location. Is this a feature EA Hub is working on in some way?
Currently, there is not easy way to do this on other platforms easily either, such as Facebook or LinkedIn (the EA/80K groups only let you search by individual).
Thanks for asking. Yes, searching by cause area, availability for hiring, volunteering or speaking, and by specific skills are all expected to be added to the Hub within a matter of weeks.
Hi David, thanks for your reply! I'm looking forward to these features.