There are a number of EA infrastructure projects that provide free or cheap support to other effective altruists, two of which I'm involved with. Something they all seem to have in common is that a major limiting factor is spreading the word about the availability of the service or product and keeping the word spread.
One can justify a handful of posts on here and in Facebook groups about any given project, but after that, unless it has changed in some way, further posts seem increasingly like spam - even when the project is still useful and still limited by EAs' remembering or ever knowing of it.
So this is a quick post with a few related objectives:
- to call for better standardisation of norms for promoting such projects
- to open discussion of some kind of such advertising on this forum, since it's probably the single place where it would be most visible
- to discuss the possibility of advertising in other venues. Eg such projects could promote each other - although again a limiter is that not all such projects know about all the others
- partly to help with 3, partly for its own sake, to provide a list of such projects. I'll mention all the ones that occur to me below with the best description I can easily find. Please let me know any I've missed in the comments, and I'll edit them into this post
The last could be quite subjective since anything could qualify as a resource and I don't want the list to become overwhelming, so I'll give some initial guidelines - feel free to persuade me they should be changed:
- The resource should be free to use, or at available at a substantial discount to relatively poor EAs
- It should be aimed specifically at EAs
- It should make the people using its lives better, not just 'enable them to do more good'
- It should be available to people across the world (ie. not just a local EA group)
- It should be a service or product that someone is putting ongoing work into (ie not just a list of tips, or Facebook/Discord/Slack groups with no purpose other than discussion of some EA subtopic)
At the very least, hopefully this post can then become a useful reference for people looking to see what benefits the community can provide them.
Coworking/socialising:
- EA Gather Town - An always-on virtual meeting place for coworking, connecting, and having both casual and impactful conversations
- EAVR - A community for people interested in Effective Altruism who use VR to connect and collaborate
- EA Anywhere - An online EA community for everyone
- EA coworking Discord - A Discord server dedicated to online coworking
Professional services:
- Altruistic Agency - provides free tech support and development to organisations
- Tech support from Soof Golan
- Legal advice from Tyrone Barugh - a practice under consideration with the primary aim of providing legal support to EA orgs and individual EAs, with that practice probably being based in the UK.
- EA mental health navigator - aims to boost people's well-being by connecting them with mental health resources considered to be effective and to have the greatest likelihood of being helpful
- SEADS - Data Science services to EA organizations
- User-Friendly - an EA-aligned marketing agency
- Anti Entropy - offers services related operations for EA organizations
- Arb - Our consulting work spans forecasting, machine learning, and epidemiology. We do original research, evidence reviews, and large-scale data pipelines.
- Pineapple Operations - Maintains a public database of people who are seeking operations or Personal Assistant/Executive Assistant work (part- or full-time) within the next 6 months in the Effective Altruism ecosystem
Coaching:
- AI Safety Support - provides free health coaching to people working on AI safety
- 80,0000 Hours career coaching - Speak with us for free about using your career to help solve one of the world’s most pressing problems
- Yonatan Cale - Coaching for software devs
- Training for Good - Our goal is to help you clarify your aims, reduce self-imposed friction, and improve your leadership.
- FAANG style mock interviews
Financial and other material support:
- CEEALAR/formerly the EA hotel - Provides free or subsidised serviced accommodation and board, and a moderate stipend for other living expenses.
- Nonlinear productivity fund - A low-barrier fund paying for productivity enhancing tools for top longtermists. Supported services and products include Coaching, Therapy, Sleep coaching, Medication management , Personal Assistants, Research Assistants, Virtual Assistants, Tutors (e.g. ML, CS, language), Asana, FocusMate, Zapier, etc., Productivity apps, A/C, dishwashers, etc, SAD Lamps
- Effective Altruism Funds - Whether an individual, organisation or other entity, we’re eager to fund great ideas and great people.
- Nonlinear fund - We incubate longtermist nonprofits by connecting founders with ideas, funding, and mentorship
- FTX Future Fund - Supports ambitious projects to improve humanity's long-term prospects
- Survival and Flourishing Fund - A “virtual fund”: we organize application submission and evaluation processes to help donors decide where to make donations.
- Open Philanthropy Project - a research and grantmaking foundation that aims to share its findings openly
- Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative - Supports university research groups working to reduce x-risk, by providing them with free services and support.
Couldn't agree more!
Some others to add to the list:
Amazing, thanks Kat!
This is a great list. Always happy to have people on EA Radio to talk about their projects if they want!
That's a cool idea, though I have the feeling that for most projects such as these there'd be relatively little to talk about beyond letting people know the product or service exists. How would you image structuring a longer conversation?
It doesn't have to be that long but I think there are a couple more things we could discuss: what groups are using these platforms, what connections are being made, what events have been done or are in the works, what do people like about the platforms, how do they differ from other ones, what features are being added or are people considering adding, what projects or impacts have resulted.
More professional services:
Together with Altruistic Agency these Agencies are working together to form an umbrella organisation but more info on this will soon be announced
Thanks! I don't have time to check all the links atm. Do you know whether any/all of them offer free or strongly discounted services?
They all offer free or strongly discounted services for EA Orgs.
Yeah, I have this pain point with: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FkWHn6WaFGzrzqb9P/i-m-offering-free-coaching-for-software-developers-in-the-ea
And lately some other services I offer, like improving job posts
How could I forget? O_O Added to the OP!
Under coaching there is also https://www.trainingforgood.com/coaching and https://lynettebye.com/services.
The list in the article seems like it's probably very incomplete. I'm not aware of other similar lists others have made, but they may exist.
I've added TfG. Lynette Bye doesn't look as though she meets the 'free or heavily discounted' requirement.
Any information I have is multiple years outdated, but her about page says "Many thanks to EA Grants, the EA Meta Fund, and the Long-Term Future Fund for supporting EA Coaching" so I assume she at least still offers some heavily discounted coaching to at least some EAs. Probably worth it for whoever is taking on the job of trying to make the list somewhat complete to reach out.
I had 4 coaching calls with her for free after 80,000 Hours directed me to her.
May I suggest adding:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NTuTSEEn2Ka54nwFC/offering-faang-style-mock-interviews
There's a newer version of this post here. I suggest that this one be linked to at the top of this post so that people don't spend a bunch of time reading through this only to realize there is a more up-to-date list of resources. I see the final comment here mentions it, but it would be better to put it prominently at the top. thanks!
Unclear if research consultancies count as infra, but Arb answer hard questions for people.
Looks as though they'd charge consultancy fees, though?
We've done pro bono stuff before, to each according to need.
The EA Opportunity Board to help members find actionable next steps!
Consider adding the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) to the list, either under Professional Services or under Financial and other material support. Suggested description: "Supports university research groups working to reduce x-risk, by providing them with free services and support."
Thanks! I've added them now.
This is a great idea! Would also add Magnify Mentoring, which provides (free!) services to support more people with mentorship, particularly those from traditionally underrepresented groups.
Sorry Jessica, I somehow missed this comment until now. I've just added them to the latest version of this post.