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Last Sunday we had our first .impact Workathon, an event focused on getting people together to get Effective-Altruist-oriented work done. A group in San Francisco worked at App Academy, and the rest worked remotely. We had approximately 15 people show up in total.
Overall people seemed to like it a lot. We decided to schedule another one this coming Sunday. We'll try holding these weekly or bi-weekly. We will experiment with other meetings happening during the workathons; that way people know to expect that all online events and activity will happen within a standard time frame. The workathon may become a period of time for people to both do work, and on occasion attend online meetings to discuss projects. We'll begin this with a Deep Dive on Effective Altruism Policy Analysis that will also happen on this coming Sunday during that time frame.
We have a pretty long hackpad of all the work done, videos from the event (setup and checkin), the event template, event feedback (goods, bads, etc), and some of the original activities we considered.
If you have been considering working on something, or are interested in advising other projects, we invite you to come along! We also think this could be a good format for other groups thinking of ways to have group activities that are both fun and productive.
We held a similar thing in London a few weeks ago and I was planning to organise another one. But we could join in with your .impact workathon instead.
The only difficult thing is that Pacific time is quite far from UK time. We could at least have some overlap though.
The current .workathon time is 12-4pm Pacific time Sunday, which is 6pm-10pm UTC. My guess is that this wouldn't be the best time for you to work, but it would be pretty cool if it could cross with your event. We could probably move our event a bit earlier if it would make a difference.
If you decide not to do it at the same time, I would recommend still making a fb page for it and inviting people to come, in a similar manner. I definitely recommend keeping track of the event with a similar hackpad.
It would be really fantastic if we could have ongoing and routinely scheduled work sessions that are online, open to everyone, and in time schedules that could incorporate everyone.
And if Australia joins in then the sun will never set on the .impact workathon :)
I'll join in for a bit this week and then for the next one I'll publicise to more people and set up a London location for it.