Hi, call me Rahela. I'm working in Anima International, as IT manager. In free time I write my personal blog about animals, effective helping, ethics and life on the countryside. I also host a podcast about similar topics. You can find me here https://calkiemnudnezycie.pl/
Reach out to me if you have questions about our work in IT in Anima International, sometimes we can help and give ready solutions.
Jakub Stencel, Weronika Zurek thanks that you wrote about it in public. I read it already in polish, but I think it is worth to sharing Anima International results and mistakes that were made but also lessons that we learned.
Thank you Meghan Barrett for this summary. I really like the table view, and I hope this topic will be more popular for society.
Thank you Ewelina H, I wish I had known at the time what questions to ask myself, and how to follow a path that would make me truly happy and show me how to help and change the world for the better.
Olivia Addy I'm glad you wrote this post, today my supervisor forwarded it to me regarding our last conversation when I told him that I'm too stupid to work for such a big organization as Anima International. It all had a beginning in that, as a person with a strong interest in insects, I read a discussion on genes of insects and couldn't grasp any of it, although I'm in the middle of Richard Dawkins' book, "The selfish gene" not much in my head cleared up. Then it came to me that maybe I don't deserve this job.
Reading the comments below, I know I'm not stupid. Probably, I know more about some topics than many of the people around me, but getting into a pro-animal environment where it's so important to act effectively, my head went through a lot of changes. The beginnings were difficult, as were the beginnings with this forum, which I didn't understand, I knew, it's probably the only forum where comments are sometimes like separate posts and deserve their own development. Someone told me that even William MacAskill is afraid to add posts here, :) Don't know if this is true, but then I decided to create an account here and even created some draft of post.
At some point after reading a few posts on this forum I decided that I wanted to participate in The Blog Prize, as a blogger I have no problem with writing, Nick Whitacker added me to the slack regarding writing posts for this competition and I quickly calmed down as I saw what people were writing within their posts. Once again, I felt too stupid. I wrote feedback to Nick that I thought I could rather write at a basic level, which Nick agreed with and said that such texts are also needed, but to this day I haven't written a word. And this is even worse for me. Today, I know that I should do one thing at the time.
To sum up, I have the impression (I don't have any good data for this) that I am undermining myself. I understand that I have my own limitations, e.g. I can't make logical conclusions quickly, some content here is completely incomprehensible to me, I'm not so good at Math, but I want to be part of this community, and I want to be part of Anima International. I believe that if I were too stupid, no one would hire me. This shows me that most of the limitations I have, I create for myself. A colleague of mine once told me, Rahela I didn't know all this either, but I read a lot and learned. I think this is the solution, although it scares me that I am already 42 years old and maybe too late for me, but I am not going to give up, so Olivia you are not alone :)
I recommend working for this organization, as an employed person I admire Anima International how it is able to build a culture, solve problems to work most effectively for animals. Above that, you can learn a lot from people from other countries and learn about their culture and scope of activities, the fact that we operate in many countries allows us to open up to a broader perspective of activities for animals.
Thanks Robert_Wiblin, for me about 2 years ago, the hardest thing was to let it go, but since I'm aware that discussions, especially on Internet sometimes go nowhere my Life is better:) Also now I'm double-checking if I'm not wrong on something.
Ben_West thanks for this text. I have some examples of outsourcing work in our organisations. And even when sometimes they are for free, for me as a Project Manager it is an additional cost, mostly time which is precious in NGO. Communication and trying to explain what is matter for us is sometimes very complicated, especially if someone wants to contact by mail. From last cooperation we did many improvements, like for example adding people to our slack and explaining the way we work in IT (even about code to not have broken windows after cooperation like that). But I still think that outsourcing should be rethought twice to not have more work than less. So thank you for your view for this topic.
Justis thank you. I used this too many times and as a non-native speaker or writer, your post is helpful for me.
Hey, thanks Aaron for this. Did you see a Gitlab Hanbook? Maybe you will find some inspiration. I think maybe it would be better for reading if you would create this as a page like here for example https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/ai-forecasting I'm sorry if I missed this somehow and the handbook already exist in that form. As I understand it will be only bigger with time, so it would be easier to read and also adding posts under, connected to the handbook would be more user-friendly? What you think?
Thanks, Max Taylor, for this post. I wasn't aware of the extent of the harm that can be caused by AI. I knew about the problems that could arise on large farms, the intensification of production, and the significant harm to animals, but I never thought about self-driving cars that can collide with small animals. This text perfectly summarized my lack of knowledge about AI, and I look forward to another post on this topic. The amount of sources is incredible; thanks to you, I learned about human-controlled insects, which raises another ethical issue.