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This is a retrospective post for the Tools for Collaborative Truth Seeking project. We looked at some metrics after six months, primarily views on youtube videos and views on the forum posts.
The project took around 55 hours of work in total, and consisted of 8 forum posts and 8 live events in the EA GatherTown where we discussed the use of the tool and used it for a short exercise.
The project seems to have had moderate reach, though this varied a lot between different tools. In particular, the Excalidraw tutorial was seen by 3.4k people on the forum and 3.1k people on YouTube. 16 people in total attended the workshops (counting twice if somebody attended two workshops).
Guesstimate users increased 1120 from 21674 to 22794 (though we don't know how much of this is counterfactual on the project, if any). We had planned to use total and new forum posts as a metric, but the forum search tool was altered in the backend between the end of the project and now.
More informally, I'd say the project felt like something that was worth doing; I'd be happy to do something similar again for the amount of time it took. We received a comment from somebody in an EA organisation saying that one of the tutorials had made them use one of the tools a lot more than they did previously, and we had some very positive comments. I expect that impact is somewhat heavy-tailed here, where changing the culture in a couple of large & highly-effective organisations is going to save a lot of people time on impactful projects.
We didn't make any explicit predictions of impact, but I did feel surprised about the number of views we got on the Excalidraw video and the posts for Squiggle and Excalidraw (in all three cases, I was expecting us to achieve less reach).
