Thank you so much for these ideas and thoughts! (And my apologies it has taken so long to respond.) I plan to start with the list Lizka posted, but will absolutely think about whether I can pull off the strategy you mentioned if I come up empty handed from a more straightforward approach.
I would also be interested in any recordings or notes you have from this conversation! I've wondered whether protests work for years, and the answer seems complicated and I'd love some entry points or summaries!
I love this idea! I somewhat recently realized it would be helpful to try to just build an EA community within RTI, more generally. But you're right that it's very unlikely I'm alone right now, and I could really use the extra hands and brains to make progress on these initiatives more quickly.
Hi Linch,
My apologies for the delayed response.
I appreciate your questions, and I didn’t find the tone off-putting at all! Please read my frank tone as honesty and (attempted) clarity rather than a sign that I’m ungrateful for your input. :)
Your thoughts raised some new questions for me. Here are some responses, but for what it’s worth, I would not categorize all of them as “answers.”
I’d like to start with your final point because I think it will help contextualize both my original post and the rest of my thoughts that follow.
Linch re: starting small and expanding outwards into the organization --
Lauren: In short, yes! That’s my only plan for implementation. I plan to pilot a few of these ideas in small(ish) groups of willing people, and then bring the results to management. At this point, I would also enumerate all of the reasons I can think of for why implementing them more broadly would be helpful from a business perspective. (For example, there is an initiative fairly high-up in the organization centered on employee retention. This tells me RTI is nervous about our retention rates. Based on anecdotal evidence, I think better aligning our actions with our mission/vision would be really helpful in keeping our folks fulfilled.)
Now onto the rest of your questions, in the order you posed them:
Hi Raymond!
I just posted about how I'm trying to integrate EA ideas into a large, non-EA, non-profit research organization. It's very much a work in progress, but I expect to learn a lot as I go, and plan to share what I learn with the community. (Perhaps it's the beginnings of an 80,000 Hours for organizations.) Nevertheless, I thought I'd direct you to that post so that you can watch there, as well, for any relevant answers to this question.
I think this is excellent advice.
Some additional thoughts:
Thank you for these suggestions!
Thank you for linking this post to those other posts! Definitely interesting, and I can see some overlap.
Thank you so much, Lizka! I will take a look at these!