Your suggestions are good and we can imagine doing them in the future, but I think we should prioritise the research problem for reasons I'll explain.

For your matching developers with projects scenarios (e.g. conference or prizes), they would make sense if:

• We already knew what the most effective software projects were
• There was an undersupply of software developers taking them up, perhaps because they didn't know about them

We think that there is some truth in this - it's hard to find lists of tech orgs of any type, and there aren't many lists of tech orgs that plausibly have a high positive impact. However, I don't think we're anywhere close to knowing what the most high impact software projects or organisations are. We are planning to publish a list of altruistic tech organisations, although we'll be unable to prioritise them until we have made more progress on research.

There's an analogy with early 80,000 Hours or GiveWell here. Early 80,000 Hours could have put all its effort into promoting what it thought at the time was the best way to have impact - earning to give. As we've found out, this would have been a mistake. By focussing on research they've developed much better advice than 'everyone should do earning to give'.

Similarly GiveWell or Giving What We Can could have just picked a few charities that on the face of it seemed high impact and then worked on finding donors for them. If they'd done this and then stopped researching, they probably wouldn't have found the options that they have now, nor would they be as credible for donors.

On running informal meetings:

This could have a couple of purposes:

1. Matching people with orgs or other people so they can work on important projects
2. Getting people talking about high impact tech so that we can make progress on working out what tech is high impact

I've addressed point 1 already. On point 2, I don't think meetups or conferences are the best way to make progress. The questions we are trying to answer are very difficult and I don't think people informally talking will cause much progress to happen.

Imagine if EA had started with some people asking 'How can we have the most impact?' and then instead of setting up organisations like GiveWell and 80,000 Hours, they had immediately concentrated on community, running conferences and meetups. I think we might have ended up like the conventional ethical sector - lots of people doing things and lots of ideas, but not much progress on prioritisation.

A stronger version of this option would be a more formal structure. There could be a forum (in person or online) for dedicated people to try to make progress on these questions. I think this could be a good option although we'd need to think about how to keep quality high.

I read Givewell's 'Science policy and infrastructure' proposal but I don't see how it relates to our project. What kinds of software regulation might we lobby politicians to change?

To explain why I downvoted, I don't like this general kind of response (i.e. "shouldn't this be part of large organisation X?"):

• It discourages people from actually doing things, for several reasons.
• Dealing with a large organisation before starting the work takes time and is offputting, and many ideas will peter out or run into the ground if people are pressured to always do this.
• It's quite a negative response to give to someone trying to start something.
• It can involve unhealthy deference to or hero worship of large organisations.
• There are rarely strong reasons for a large organization to take over the projects that people suggest they do, and cross-linking often allows all the same benefits.
• It encourages a 'turf' mentality.
• Having many people experiment with many approaches is valuable, and lets us see which work.

Thanks for asking this as it's made me think more carefully about it.

Partly it's separate just because of how we got started. It's a project that Michael and I thought up because we needed it ourselves, and so we just got going with it. Given that we don't work for 80,000 Hours, it wasn't part of it.

But the more important question is 'Should it become part of 80,000 Hours in the future?' We talked to Ben Todd from 80,000 Hours and asked him what he thought of the potential for overlap. He thought it wasn't an issue as 80,000 Hours doesn't have time to go in depth into technology for good. I think if we became a subproject of 80,000 Hours, it would harm them because they'd have to spend management time on it and they should focus instead on their core priorities. It's costly to build our own brand, but I think it's better than disrupting an existing organization with an experimental project outside their own priorities. We can also find other ways of cooperating short of merging. I imagine 80,000 Hours will want to use our research if it becomes good enough, and we will want to talk to advisees of theirs who are interested in tech for good. We'll also be looking for ways to collaborate with other EA orgs like .impact and the London Good Code meetup.

There are also advantages to being independent of an existing project. We can target our brand more precisely at technologists and prioritize building relationships with people and orgs in the tech community. There's also value in thinking and researching independently of existing EA orgs because we might be able to come up with different ideas and ways of doing things.

I think there's a good chance that we'll look less and less like 80,000 Hours as we go on. I used to work for them, which means I'm prone to copy their way of doing things. As we go on, we might find that it's better to have a strategy less like 80,000 Hours than it is now.

Do you think it would be better if we were part of 80,000 Hours? What would that look like?

80000 is overloaded with its own burdens and does not have optimal resourcefulness to effectively develop a new practical large-scale initiative. Announcing the Good Technology Project has to grow as a new grassroot movement and organization.