Lots of good wishes for your personal journey and for this project!

My experience in EA is that people who eventually become your funder or your boss were your peers / people you saw around the community a few years before.

Thanks for starting this!
This is one of the areas where EA's community aspect and professional aspect may have some conflicts. I think people joining should expect some possibility of stigma e.g. from future employers and colleagues. (Not because I have any specific knowledge of this happening in EA, but just seems like a thing that happens in the world.)
Making pseudonymous accounts might be a good idea.

Is Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785" one of the earliest writings on wild animal welfare?

Maybe he meant it mostly as a joke. (Poetry is a medium for fancy people, he's a not-fancy guy plowing a field, addressing an even-less fancy-being: a mouse.) But I kind of think he meant it? He also wrote about "poor people are good, actually," and I like that he was thinking about the even-less-powerful creature he'd just rendered homeless.

"I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!"

Wikipedia provides an English translation for those of us who find the Scots difficult.

Props for writing candidly about your experience here. Sending you good wishes on your journey!

For anybody interested in setting up a discussion group for EAs in recovery: here's some advice starting/running online discussion groups I put together a while ago. (Mostly about FB groups but mostly applicable to other platforms.)
The EA Peer Support group is another existing space.

Thanks for writing this out - I've referred back to this several times in the last month! 
I think there are some practical hitches as Jason points out, but I think there's worthwhile stuff in the spaces of "making it easier to find information about what people's options are for raising a problem" and "more alternatives to existing resources."

I interpreted it in a more literal way, like it's just true that anyone can literally call themselves part of EA. That doesn't mean other people consider it accurate.

(General question, not necessarily for Will in particular)
Re getting another regrants program started: has there been a look at how this went with Future Fund's regranting program? I viewed it as pretty experimental, and I don't have much sense of whether someone's looked at the pros and cons of that system. Obviously that project came to a sudden end, so I understand why any planned analysis didn't happen as planned.

Thanks for raising these concerns.

I really don’t want this project to mean that other projects on reform don’t happen!

The large EA organizations I’ve talked to have been taking their own looks at changes in some of these same areas. I think there could also be valuable projects led from outside the major organizations. As you point out, people and organizations will always have limitations based on their own interests and viewpoints. I think it’s important for different efforts to fill in each other’s gaps.

About the overlap between this project and the community health and special projects team: there’s a lot of overlap between these areas, but I didn’t want this project to just belong to a single team or organization. I first sketched out an idea for this project in December and spent a few months trying to get advice and see how much interest there was in doing something like this. As Ozzie says, “task force” might not be a good name for this. It was more like me saying “I think some people from across some different orgs should spend time looking at these questions in a more dedicated way than will happen by default” and gathering some people to help with that, rather than a top-down thing that someone else tasked us with.

About weaknesses of my team: I agree this wouldn’t be the right project to evaluate those, given my involvement in both. There’s a separate set of investigations into the mistakes you refer to.

About reforms on sexual misconduct: This project is exploring what organizations can do in this area, like:

• Some small organizations don’t have written staff policies about harassment or conflicts of interest. What could be done to make this easier for them and encourage them to implement these policies?
• What can organizations do to encourage a good culture in EA? A past example is CEA’s guiding principles.
• Looking at how organizations can shape culture: via policies at events like EAG and EAGx, via trainings for group organizers, etc.

This project is focused on policy changes that organizations can make, and isn’t going to cover all the changes that might be a good idea. The gender experiences project is a different kind of project aimed at understanding where change might be needed.

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I’m so sorry about the bad behavior you experienced!

I especially appreciate the description of what it’s like to be new in an area (geographic, social, or professional) and not have your feet under you enough to immediately get out of a bad situation. This highlights why it’s important for more-established people to pay attention to the culture and look out for what’s happening to newer or more vulnerable people.

There’s an ongoing question about how much some of these dynamics are regional (especially Bay Area-specific) vs more universal. I appreciate you noting that an emphasis on pickup artistry was also present in the Boston/Cambridge area, and I’ll DM you about that dynamic, which definitely interests me as one of the local organizers there.