Someone: “Gee, it would sure be nice if we had this cool new feature on LessWrong!”
EY/similar person: “Gee, it sure would. Too bad we don’t have any development resources.”
How would one go about volunteering to do this sort of thing?
I assume that if volunteer work is accepted, it would require testing to prove that it is a quality and non-malicious change before they actually run it on the servers.
I attempted to volunteer (I’m a web developer) but that didn’t go anywhere. First, I wanted to help LW grow (in my “LessWrong could grow a lot” thread). Then I realized that LW was at serious risk for eternal September and growing it would risk hastening progress toward cultural collapse. So, I did several more threads on that to see if anyone had good arguments about us not being at risk, or good suggestions on how to stop it. I compiled a list of suggestions and held a vote asking people whether they think there is a significant risk and which solution, if any, they wanted. The result was that the majority of respondents think there is a significant risk, and this was presented to Luke, but he said he doesn’t want to do anything at this time.
That was, to put it mildly, a bit of a buzz kill in regards to my volunteering energy level.
My advice to you is to make sure of the following things:
That you and Luke (yes, Luke seems to be the contact person) both agree on a project that is to be done. Luke liked the idea of growing LW, but he didn’t like the idea of preventing cultural collapse. I can’t, in good conscience, grow LW if there is a significant risk of it contributing to cultural collapse, and the group thinks that there is a significant risk. So, we unfortunately appear to be at a stalemate.
That Luke is cool with you specifically making changes. (Luke will need to go to some trouble to verify that you’re a good developer. This will take time, and he may or may not be willing to invest it.)
There are multiple people who are interested in doing volunteer work. Myself, you, and at least one other have expressed interest, and I could have swore there were more. Considering that, and the fact that this website is basically full of programmers up to the eyebrows, and the fact that they could ask for volunteers at any time, I really think lack of development resources is not an obstacle. If you attempt to explore and/or tackle the following obstacles you may get somewhere:
Obstacle 1: Luke and Eliezer may be unaware of how many potential developer volunteers they have.
Solution 1: Survey the group asking how many people would be willing to volunteer their web development skills, and which specific skills they can offer. Ask them to describe what type of time commitment they’re willing to provide in the comments. (I don’t think there’s an easy way to organize a bunch of responses that will range from “an hour a week” to “I’ll commit, but on a per project basis, depending on the project.” I know that one of the research volunteers does the former, and that there is a potential volunteer web development manager who is interested in the latter arrangement.)
Obstacle 2: Managing volunteers has a cost—overhead. Luke and EY are busy, and they’re “pivoting away from” community building (see the recent fundraiser post). Although Luke and EY still want to lead the LessWrong community, they must be very short on time. Luke and EY probably do not realistically have the time to manage web development volunteers.
Solution 2: When surveying the group to get an idea of the development resources potential, be sure to ask whether the respondents have experience managing web developers and would be willing to provide this service. Obviously Luke will have to decide whether to trust the volunteer manager, but making a decision about that one person is easier than managing a whole bunch of them, and double-checking the projects when they’re finished is a heck of a lot faster than doing all the hand-holding that may otherwise be anticipated without such a manager in place.
If enough people volunteer, this will wake everybody (including them) up to the developer resources that they already have. If their true rejection has not been uncovered, broaching the subject of having a volunteer manager might be the hammer that hits that nail on the head.
I’m seeing one “yes” and one “maybe” response on the volunteers wanted thread you referenced. Any idea why he said “no one” responded?
Also, that was posted about four years ago. The site has grown massively since then. There were (looks at my spreadsheet from Trike Apps full of registration dates) 373 members on 3-11-09. They hadn’t even added Overcoming Bias yet. (That happened on 5-28-09). If the number of volunteers has increased proportionately to the number of members, then one or two volunteers four years ago could be a team today, as there are over one hundred times as many registered users now (13,726 as of 8-24-2012).
If they asked again, they might get dozens of volunteers.
It looks to me like all they need is a strategy to predict which ones are worth the overhead, and someone to manage them. Then, if they posted a “volunteers wanted” thread again, they might succeed.
I wonder if they’re choosy about what language the person normally uses. The code I work with at my job is not written in Python, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be willing to put in the extra effort to work with new syntax and get into Python reference documentation.
If you really want to volunteer, install and configure the LW code from github, make the changes, test them and present a working fork to EY to poke at and give you feedback. If he likes the result, he’ll probably ask Trike to review and integrate your changes. Or something along these lines.
That’s the second time I’ve heard that piece of advice.
If I desire to make a change that is most likely wanted, not too large a time investment (as I am risking that the change is ignored or rejected), and also the sort of change that can be made by editing the open source (as opposed to, say, an SEO change specific to the text in an article or something), I will consider doing just that.
That’s the second time I’ve heard that piece of advice.
Oops, sorry. I should have realized. My thought process was “If I were Luke, what kind of volunteer help with the site would I prefer?” And the answer is invariably “minimum hassle”.
The other person told me elsewhere. There’s no way you would have known about it. The intended meaning of “That’s the second time...” was “When more than one person tells me something, that makes it seem more likely to be useful.”
My thought process was “If I were Luke, what kind of volunteer help with the site would I prefer?” And the answer is invariably “minimum hassle”.
Something to consider is that work on the lesswrong codebase is something anyone can do. After something is identified that Eliezer would want if it was available then any old person can create the code. Then all that is required from officially endorsed types is to review the code, test and consider pulling it into the official codebase.
The obvious starting point would be to email somebody. I don’t know who would be most appropriate, so for the sake of having a concrete recommendation, Luke?
Unfortunately, the code base takes a fair bit of time to learn. It is cheaper to pay for LW development from its current developers than to take risks with volunteer developers learning the code base and implementing changes.
A better destination for volunteer developers, I think, is CFAR app development, e.g. improving their calibration app, developing new apps for training particular rationality skills, etc. The contact person for this should be Anna Salamon.
Coming up with your own volunteer projects is hard, because people outside the organization can’t possibly know the details of what’s going on — e.g. the many past failed attempts at volunteer development for LW. Thus, volunteer projects are better generated by MIRI staff, and those are listed here.
LessWrong has a lot of threads that go like:
Someone: “Gee, it would sure be nice if we had this cool new feature on LessWrong!”
EY/similar person: “Gee, it sure would. Too bad we don’t have any development resources.”
How would one go about volunteering to do this sort of thing?
I assume that if volunteer work is accepted, it would require testing to prove that it is a quality and non-malicious change before they actually run it on the servers.
I attempted to volunteer (I’m a web developer) but that didn’t go anywhere. First, I wanted to help LW grow (in my “LessWrong could grow a lot” thread). Then I realized that LW was at serious risk for eternal September and growing it would risk hastening progress toward cultural collapse. So, I did several more threads on that to see if anyone had good arguments about us not being at risk, or good suggestions on how to stop it. I compiled a list of suggestions and held a vote asking people whether they think there is a significant risk and which solution, if any, they wanted. The result was that the majority of respondents think there is a significant risk, and this was presented to Luke, but he said he doesn’t want to do anything at this time.
That was, to put it mildly, a bit of a buzz kill in regards to my volunteering energy level.
My advice to you is to make sure of the following things:
That you and Luke (yes, Luke seems to be the contact person) both agree on a project that is to be done. Luke liked the idea of growing LW, but he didn’t like the idea of preventing cultural collapse. I can’t, in good conscience, grow LW if there is a significant risk of it contributing to cultural collapse, and the group thinks that there is a significant risk. So, we unfortunately appear to be at a stalemate.
That Luke is cool with you specifically making changes. (Luke will need to go to some trouble to verify that you’re a good developer. This will take time, and he may or may not be willing to invest it.)
There are multiple people who are interested in doing volunteer work. Myself, you, and at least one other have expressed interest, and I could have swore there were more. Considering that, and the fact that this website is basically full of programmers up to the eyebrows, and the fact that they could ask for volunteers at any time, I really think lack of development resources is not an obstacle. If you attempt to explore and/or tackle the following obstacles you may get somewhere:
Obstacle 1: Luke and Eliezer may be unaware of how many potential developer volunteers they have.
Solution 1: Survey the group asking how many people would be willing to volunteer their web development skills, and which specific skills they can offer. Ask them to describe what type of time commitment they’re willing to provide in the comments. (I don’t think there’s an easy way to organize a bunch of responses that will range from “an hour a week” to “I’ll commit, but on a per project basis, depending on the project.” I know that one of the research volunteers does the former, and that there is a potential volunteer web development manager who is interested in the latter arrangement.)
Obstacle 2: Managing volunteers has a cost—overhead. Luke and EY are busy, and they’re “pivoting away from” community building (see the recent fundraiser post). Although Luke and EY still want to lead the LessWrong community, they must be very short on time. Luke and EY probably do not realistically have the time to manage web development volunteers.
Solution 2: When surveying the group to get an idea of the development resources potential, be sure to ask whether the respondents have experience managing web developers and would be willing to provide this service. Obviously Luke will have to decide whether to trust the volunteer manager, but making a decision about that one person is easier than managing a whole bunch of them, and double-checking the projects when they’re finished is a heck of a lot faster than doing all the hand-holding that may otherwise be anticipated without such a manager in place.
If enough people volunteer, this will wake everybody (including them) up to the developer resources that they already have. If their true rejection has not been uncovered, broaching the subject of having a volunteer manager might be the hammer that hits that nail on the head.
Luke explains here
IIRC, a while after posting this years ago, EY complained that no one responded to it.
I’m seeing one “yes” and one “maybe” response on the volunteers wanted thread you referenced. Any idea why he said “no one” responded?
Also, that was posted about four years ago. The site has grown massively since then. There were (looks at my spreadsheet from Trike Apps full of registration dates) 373 members on 3-11-09. They hadn’t even added Overcoming Bias yet. (That happened on 5-28-09). If the number of volunteers has increased proportionately to the number of members, then one or two volunteers four years ago could be a team today, as there are over one hundred times as many registered users now (13,726 as of 8-24-2012).
If they asked again, they might get dozens of volunteers.
It looks to me like all they need is a strategy to predict which ones are worth the overhead, and someone to manage them. Then, if they posted a “volunteers wanted” thread again, they might succeed.
It’s a very vague recollection, I just remember him complaining about the lack of Python volunteers.
I wonder if they’re choosy about what language the person normally uses. The code I work with at my job is not written in Python, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be willing to put in the extra effort to work with new syntax and get into Python reference documentation.
If you really want to volunteer, install and configure the LW code from github, make the changes, test them and present a working fork to EY to poke at and give you feedback. If he likes the result, he’ll probably ask Trike to review and integrate your changes. Or something along these lines.
That’s the second time I’ve heard that piece of advice.
If I desire to make a change that is most likely wanted, not too large a time investment (as I am risking that the change is ignored or rejected), and also the sort of change that can be made by editing the open source (as opposed to, say, an SEO change specific to the text in an article or something), I will consider doing just that.
Oops, sorry. I should have realized. My thought process was “If I were Luke, what kind of volunteer help with the site would I prefer?” And the answer is invariably “minimum hassle”.
The other person told me elsewhere. There’s no way you would have known about it. The intended meaning of “That’s the second time...” was “When more than one person tells me something, that makes it seem more likely to be useful.”
Heh. You’re probably right.
Something to consider is that work on the lesswrong codebase is something anyone can do. After something is identified that Eliezer would want if it was available then any old person can create the code. Then all that is required from officially endorsed types is to review the code, test and consider pulling it into the official codebase.
The obvious starting point would be to email somebody. I don’t know who would be most appropriate, so for the sake of having a concrete recommendation, Luke?
Unfortunately, the code base takes a fair bit of time to learn. It is cheaper to pay for LW development from its current developers than to take risks with volunteer developers learning the code base and implementing changes.
A better destination for volunteer developers, I think, is CFAR app development, e.g. improving their calibration app, developing new apps for training particular rationality skills, etc. The contact person for this should be Anna Salamon.
Coming up with your own volunteer projects is hard, because people outside the organization can’t possibly know the details of what’s going on — e.g. the many past failed attempts at volunteer development for LW. Thus, volunteer projects are better generated by MIRI staff, and those are listed here.
(Nevermind. I see now that Luke has responded, making this irrelevant.)