We have passed our March 1st deadline for our first section and have not quite completed all we aimed to do. We have two large changes from our original goals and outlined steps.
The first change is we moved our deepening knowledge step to our next research phase. We found that as we did the research a deepening knowledge step on a whole intervention did not seem as productive as spending more time on our top specific charity ideas. This was particularly true because within the 40 hours of intervention research, we often had much more specific ideas we wanted to pursue at a deeper level. The second big change of plans regards the publishing of our research. Our original plan was to have all of our research notes published in real time to allow for feedback from the broader effective charity community. We found publishing our research to be extremely time consuming, even with the help of our volunteer team, as a huge amount of our researcher time had to be spent improving and making the reports more understandable to someone who wasn’t familiar with the intervention area. We also ended up spending a lot of time polishing and improving reports for interventions we were very confident we were not going to do future research on. This felt like a waste as our main goal is to find the most promising interventions instead of fully explaining our reasoning for the ones we ruled out. So although we planned on doing both of these aspects before March 1st we now plan on moving the deep dive section to our specific charity ideas research and to publish higher level and more board information instead of all of our notes. Specifically we plan on publishing our summary spreadsheet, and a short paragraph explanation for the main reason we ruled out the interventions we did. We expect these to be published in the next few weeks. We plan on and already have started using some of the time gained from these moves on more research into some areas that were not originally on our list,like NCDs in the developing world and to get more specific feedback from domain experts.
