EA - EA could use better internal communications infrastructure by Ozzie Gooen

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA could use better internal communications infrastructure, published by Ozzie Gooen on January 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(This was a quick post, written in around 30 min. It was originally posted on Facebook, where it generated some good discussion.)I really wish EA had better internal communications.If I wanted to make a blog post / message / recording accessible to a "large subset of effective altruist professionals", I'm not sure how I'd do that.I don't think we yet have:One accepted chat systemAn internal blogging systemAny internal email lists (for a very wide net of EA professionals)It's nice to encourage people to communicate publicly, but there's a lot of communication that's really not meant for that.Generally, the existing options are:Post to your internal org slack/emails (note: many EA orgs are tiny)Share with people in your officePost to one of a few domain-specific and idiosyncratic Slacks/DiscordsPost publicly, for everyone to seeI think the SBF situation might have shown some substantial vulnerability here. It was a crisis where public statements were taken as serious legal statements. This meant that EA leadership essentially didn’t have a real method of communicating with most EAs.I feel like much of EA is a lot like one big org that tries really hard not to be one big org. This gives us some advantages of being decentralized, but we are missing a lot of the advantages of centralization. If "Professional EAs" were looked at as one large org, I'd expect that we'd look fairly amateur, compared to other sizeable organizations.A very simple way to make progress on internal communications is to separate the issue into a few clusters, and then attack each one separately.Access/Onboarding/OffboardingMake official lists that cover "professional/trusted members". You could start with simple criteria like "works at an org funded by an EA funder" or "went to 2+ EAGs".Negotiation and Moderation"EA Professionals" might basically be an "enterprise", and need "enterprise tools". These often are expensive and require negotiation.A Responsible IndividualMy preference would be that we find someone who did a good job at this sort of thing in other sizeable companies and try to get them to do it here.I bet with $200k/year for the talent, plus maybe $200k-$1k/year, we could have a decent setup, assuming we could find good enough talent. That said, this would definitely be work to establish, so I wouldn't expect anything soon.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.