That's very fair! I certainly don't want anyone to use the Forum more than they believe is worthwhile. My guess is that a healthy relationship with the Forum looks different for different people, and I don't think that every single reader should engage with the Forum more than they currently do. I recommend that people customize their Forum experience and customize their Frontpage to help with them find a good balance.

More on tech vs community building

I think that in all my time working on the Forum, it’s felt more like being on a typical software product team than being on a team of community builders or organizers. For example, when our team grew around late 2022, we primarily hired product and engineering capacity. (Though this feeling is at least partly because I was hired as a software engineer; I could imagine it was less the case for our various content managers.) Our success metrics tend to be things like MAUs (monthly active users), clicks, and time on page / engagement hours.

IMO, focusing on the software made more sense when the community was growing organically, and when it was growing for reasons outside of our control (like via comms/marketing around What We Owe The Future). That’s not our current situation. While I still think there are a lot of valuable improvements we can make on the tech side, right now I believe that the community side is more neglected so we should be focusing our efforts there.

Going down to 1 FTE of engineering on the Forum has been difficult. We’ve let bugs exist for longer on the site, been worse at addressing customer service requests, and have very little capacity for longer-term investments (both in terms of improving the codebase and doing feature work). These things make me personally sad, and I’m sorry to any readers who have been affected by this. As of January, we’re starting to shift capacity back towards Forum engineering, so it will probably settle closer to 1.5 FTE. Even with the focus on community building, I think that the space that holds the community matters quite a lot and we don’t want it to start hindering our work.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   For more on this point, see this LW comment from Habryka.

More on where I’m coming from

I joined the CEA Online Team in late 2021 as a software engineer. Most of the time I’ve been on the team, I’ve been focused on building parts of the Forum that are outside of the core reading/writing experience (such as groups and connections). I still believe in my heart that this was worth working on, and that it can be particularly valuable to build out these non-core features on the margin. I have a soft spot for making “doing good” more accessible and helping more people find ways to take concrete steps, and I think the Forum is well-placed to do that.

However, as mentioned above, I think that the value of these non-core features depends on having a strong and healthy Forum community. Faced with being actually responsible for the success of the Forum, I’ve (sadly) decided that our team needs to drop most work on non-core features, and even most of the product/engineering work on core features. We’re down to approximately 1.5 FTE of software engineering on the Online Team, and much of that is taken up by non-Forum work (such as the recent CEA.org redesign). Instead, we are focusing on increasing the amount of high-quality content on the Forum, via a combination of community building and more actively steering the Forum ourselves (such as with more themed events and revisiting our moderation processes).

Since I’m relatively new at this interim role, I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and I’m probably making some mistakes. So I will again emphasize that I am very open to and interested in feedback, especially if you have any disagreements on how/why the Forum is falling short, or disagreements on how the Online Team should be spending our time.

Ah yeah sorry, the doc just has a summary of our OKRs, which is meant to broadly communicate what our team is working on. It's not the actual text from our OKRs. I've added a sentence to clarify that.

The CEA Online Team (which runs this Forum) has finalized our OKRs for the first half-quarter of 2025 — here's a link to the new doc for a new year.

Thanks Michel! Our team hasn't been keeping that field up-to-date either, so I've gone ahead and removed the filter from the Opportunity Board, and removed the field from the Orgs page as well. :) 

Good question! To be honest I also thought that filter was a bit odd. Perhaps @michel would like to weigh in?

I could imagine something like: users of the Opportunity Board skew towards people newer to EA, and they wanted a filter like this to better orient themselves within the EA ecosystem.

Note that our team hasn't changed the functionality on the site at all (right now our team only has capacity to keep it running, meaning adding new opportunities, removing old ones, sending out the newsletter, and responding to incoming requests). I think there are many potential UX improvements to the Opportunity Board, which hopefully we'll have capacity to do at some point. (It's still helpful to get feedback now though!)

Thanks for sharing, and best of luck in your new role! A lot of these resonate with me as well, as things I've thought about when considering whether to apply to work at an AI company. It would be cool to read an update from you after you've worked there for a while (maybe like six months), especially if you've changed your mind about anything.

Just wanted to share that, in addition to EA Opportunities, the CEA Online Team has also taken on EA Virtual Programs (previously it was part of the CEA Groups Team). Currently this mostly just means that @Cian M has moved over to the Online Team, but we plan to invest more resources into it than before. Keep an eye on the Forum for future updates! :)

That credit goes to our designer @Agnes Stenlund! 😊