EA Common App Development Further Encouragement

The article: “EA Common App Development Further Encouragement”

Fundamental Justification

What positive impact did you expect before you started the project? What were unusually good and unusually bad possible outcomes? (Please avoid hindsight bias and take the interests of all sentient beings into account.)

I expected that this post will make the community more interested in a Common App development and thus expedite its existence. I further hoped to assure or facilitate transparency and support of all applicants in their objectives. An unusually good outcome would be someone expressing interest in developing this app in a way that engages key decisionmakers and conducts multiple test rounds. An unusually bad outcome would be key decisionmakers expressing discouragement for purposes not clearly stated, possibly implying the navigation of suboptimal dynamics.

What actual outcomes are you aware of?

A few days later, Lorenzo wrote two posts “Who's hiring?” and “Who wants to be hired?,” which quote “This was inspired by the talks around an EA common application, especially this comment.” These posts were pinned at the top of the EA Forum and at the time of submitting this certificate had 24 and 22 answers and 87 and 91 upvotes, respectively.

Who can make a legitimate claim to a fraction of the impact, and have you talked to them?

I messaged Vaidehi about the Common App after Cristina Schmidt Ibáñez and she wrote the Coordination within EA: community & ecosystems post. Unfortunately, she had to cancel a call due to traveling so we did not speak. Further, I spoke with Charles He, who commented about the App in this post and he shared with me some of his earlier thinking. Then, he wrote Brief Presentation and Considerations for an EA Common Application,” which I noticed a few days before writing this post and which greatly encouraged me for such.

I think that Cristina wrote a significant fraction of the initial post but could have been hesitant to post it without Vaidehi’s encouragement. Vaidehi was approachable for a message and missed the call and thus gave me time to organize my thoughts. Charles He motivated me to write this post assuming positive interest and almost ‘just a matter of writing this down.’ This was further supported by Luke Freeman’s comment on Charles’s post and his other comment elsewhere on interest in funding applications consolidation.

So, Charles can fairly claim 10%, Vaidehi 5%, and Cristina and Luke each 2%.

Who are the current owners of the impact and what fraction do they each own?

A conversation about impact ownership has not taken place.

Procedural Questions

What is your minimum valuation under which you’ll not sell any shares in your impact?

I would seek to hold at least 75% (ideally about 90%) until a useful Common App appears or until the Common App developers start convincingly distancing themselves from this post or until the community starts expecting a negative impact of this piece on a positive development of the community (with or without a Common App). The 10% I can sell for $100/% (before a useful Common App occurs) which is a good deal, because a Common App increases the efficiency of EA, thus multiplies already great impact (plus facilitates the development of skills and projects that could possibly not happen otherwise).

What would you have done had there been no chance to get retro funding? (This helps us assess our impact but has no effect on our evaluation of the certificate’s impact.)

I wrote this post before the retro funding post occurred, so I did not take this into consideration.

What can we improve about this process?

• User-friendlier submission formatting.
• The legal language of the confirmation is vague: Which rights? What if I sell the certificate and then buy it again for re-selling? If I am happy then do I agree? Is the permanent storage of data without the user's ability to edit or delete the record consistent with GDPR and other legislation? Even if it is possible to legally prevent users from editing a public record (e. g. since no personal data is shared), do you want to either enable edits, truncations, or public removal for purposes such as protecting others' privacy (if someone mentions something about who influenced who to write what etc) or if the legislation generally is that online comments can stay public then not stating it, or making it sound less daunting, for example 'I acknowledge that this post is posted online.'