This post is an announcement of an initiative of the Centre for Effective Altruism called "EA Advocates."
EA Advocates is a new grassroots rapid response team that will amplify positive coverage of effective altruism and help spread information and ideas. Members will coordinate to execute responses during particular times when they can be unusually effective.
Peter Singer has joined as the first public signatory of EA Advocates. If you choose to join this group, you're affirming your intention to participate in some simple, but important, actions on social networks and other online settings. Some of these will be as quick as sharing favorable articles, and others may involve writing comments or brief reviews of EA-related publications. Key initiatives that EA Advocates will take actions to support this year include the current release of Peter Singer’s book, Will MacAskill’s book on effective altruism due out later this year, and the EA Global summit.
The main things we know in advance that we'll focus on this year are those two books and the EA Global summit. We're also keeping an eye out for unexpected situations where a social media response could be useful. For example, when Will MacAskill's ice bucket challenge article received widespread attention last year, a coordinated response could have helped direct readers of that article to the follow-up article that went into greater depth about impact metrics.
It would be good to know when a lot of people in the group are interested in coordinating to promote something CEA might not already be thinking about, though. In the short term we can discuss possibilities on the Facebook group (invitations for that will be going out by email soon).