I am John Chavez from the Philippines. I’m a part-time teacher in a community college, teaching computer hardware servicing and maintenance to out-of-school youths.
As I take much value on helping others in my community and reach out to people who needs help, I came to know about Intentional Insights on Facebook, which leads me here in Less Wrong. I have been here for a while reading several published articles. There are a lot of articles here that I really love to read, although I must admit that there are a few that I found confusing and I disagree of.
Hence, I am introducing myself to you to formally start my quest in learning more about being rationalist.
I hope this will be enough for you to welcome me in your community. It will be humbling to know your thoughts :)
Hi John! From what you have described, I think it could be a better experience for you if you start with the more structured reading, which is (at the moment) best provided by Eliezer’s “From AI To Zombies”. You can download it for free if you follow the link. It may seem long, but it’s well worth the read.
Glad you’re joining LW, John! Nice to see another volunteer and part-time contractor for Intentional Insights join LW :-) It’s definitely a nice place to develop rationality, and don’t be put off by the occasional roughness of the commentary here.
For the rest of LW folks, I want to clarify that John volunteers at Intentional Insights for about 45 hours, and gets paid as a virtual assistant to do various administrative tasks for about 20 hours.
They work on a variety of tasks, such as website management, image creation, managing social media channels such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. Here’s an image of the organizational Trello showing some of the things that they do (Trello is a platform to organize teams together). We also have a couple more who do other stuff, such as Youtube editing, Pinterest, etc.
That doesn’t really tell me what “managing social media channels means”. Does managing Twitter mean that the person registers a Twitter page, follows random people and repost InIn articles?
Does it basically mean that the people are supposed to post links at various places?
Regarding content, the person finds appropriate things to post on Twitter, which we do about 4 times a day. This includes both InIn and non-InIn materials that we curate for our audience, and most of the things we post are not InIn content—about 2⁄3. The latter involves reading the article and determining whether our audience would find it appropriate. Then, the person writes up Tweets with appropriate hashtags for each piece. They put it into a spreadsheet. Then it gets read over by two other people for grammar/spelling/fit. Then, these are scheduled through Hootsuite, a social media scheduling app.
Regarding managing Twitter itself, this involves managing the Twitter audience of the channel, including questions, comments, etc. (we have over 10K followers on Twitter). It also involves reTweeting interesting Tweets, and other Twitter-oriented activities.
This takes place for a number of social media channels. Here’s an example of a weekly social media plan for Hootsuite, if you’re curious. This includes Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, and Google+.
This doesn’t include Pinterest, Instagram, StumbleUpon, or Delicious, since Hootsuite doesn’t handle those.
The latter involves reading the article and determining whether our audience would find it appropriate.
Who’s your target audience when you think that a Nigerian can make a good decision about whether your target audience would find an article appropriate?
That they are culturally different from Western people. They might be very well know what’s culturally appropriate to post when trying to reach a Nigerian audience but Western culture is a bit different in lot’s of aspects. The posts those people posted on LW look like they are not written by normal Western people but either by people who wrote them because they are payed to do so or by people who operate under different cultural norms.
As I think I mentioned before, Intentional Insights tries to reach a global audience, and after the US, our top three countries are non-western. So it’s highly valuable for us to have non-western volunteers/contractors who can figure out what would be salient to a diverse international audience.
Do you have other data about your impact in those countries besides passive reading numbers? Do you have links to the receptions of InIn content by non-western audiences besides those people you payed?
Links are hard, since most things I have are people writing to me. However, here is one relevant link. After finding out about our content, a prominent Indian secular humanist association invited me to do a guest blog for them. I was happy to oblige.
Five are paid as virtual assistants, but they are not paid to follow Twitter. There wouldn’t be a point to having paid followers, because the goal is to distribute content widely.
There are plenty of people who after reading our widely-shared articles then choose to engage with our social media.
Hi Less Wrong,
I am John Chavez from the Philippines. I’m a part-time teacher in a community college, teaching computer hardware servicing and maintenance to out-of-school youths.
As I take much value on helping others in my community and reach out to people who needs help, I came to know about Intentional Insights on Facebook, which leads me here in Less Wrong. I have been here for a while reading several published articles. There are a lot of articles here that I really love to read, although I must admit that there are a few that I found confusing and I disagree of.
Hence, I am introducing myself to you to formally start my quest in learning more about being rationalist.
I hope this will be enough for you to welcome me in your community. It will be humbling to know your thoughts :)
Thanks!
Hi John! From what you have described, I think it could be a better experience for you if you start with the more structured reading, which is (at the moment) best provided by Eliezer’s “From AI To Zombies”. You can download it for free if you follow the link. It may seem long, but it’s well worth the read.
Cool! Thank you. I will definitely read it. :)
Glad you’re joining LW, John! Nice to see another volunteer and part-time contractor for Intentional Insights join LW :-) It’s definitely a nice place to develop rationality, and don’t be put off by the occasional roughness of the commentary here.
For the rest of LW folks, I want to clarify that John volunteers at Intentional Insights for about 45 hours, and gets paid as a virtual assistant to do various administrative tasks for about 20 hours.
What exactly do you have them do?
They work on a variety of tasks, such as website management, image creation, managing social media channels such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. Here’s an image of the organizational Trello showing some of the things that they do (Trello is a platform to organize teams together). We also have a couple more who do other stuff, such as Youtube editing, Pinterest, etc.
That doesn’t really tell me what “managing social media channels means”. Does managing Twitter mean that the person registers a Twitter page, follows random people and repost InIn articles?
Does it basically mean that the people are supposed to post links at various places?
Managing Twitter means several things.
Regarding content, the person finds appropriate things to post on Twitter, which we do about 4 times a day. This includes both InIn and non-InIn materials that we curate for our audience, and most of the things we post are not InIn content—about 2⁄3. The latter involves reading the article and determining whether our audience would find it appropriate. Then, the person writes up Tweets with appropriate hashtags for each piece. They put it into a spreadsheet. Then it gets read over by two other people for grammar/spelling/fit. Then, these are scheduled through Hootsuite, a social media scheduling app.
Regarding managing Twitter itself, this involves managing the Twitter audience of the channel, including questions, comments, etc. (we have over 10K followers on Twitter). It also involves reTweeting interesting Tweets, and other Twitter-oriented activities.
This takes place for a number of social media channels. Here’s an example of a weekly social media plan for Hootsuite, if you’re curious. This includes Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, and Google+.
This doesn’t include Pinterest, Instagram, StumbleUpon, or Delicious, since Hootsuite doesn’t handle those.
Who’s your target audience when you think that a Nigerian can make a good decision about whether your target audience would find an article appropriate?
What are you implying about Nigerians here?
That they are culturally different from Western people. They might be very well know what’s culturally appropriate to post when trying to reach a Nigerian audience but Western culture is a bit different in lot’s of aspects. The posts those people posted on LW look like they are not written by normal Western people but either by people who wrote them because they are payed to do so or by people who operate under different cultural norms.
As I think I mentioned before, Intentional Insights tries to reach a global audience, and after the US, our top three countries are non-western. So it’s highly valuable for us to have non-western volunteers/contractors who can figure out what would be salient to a diverse international audience.
Do you have other data about your impact in those countries besides passive reading numbers? Do you have links to the receptions of InIn content by non-western audiences besides those people you payed?
Links are hard, since most things I have are people writing to me. However, here is one relevant link. After finding out about our content, a prominent Indian secular humanist association invited me to do a guest blog for them. I was happy to oblige.
How many of those are payed and how many organic?
Five are paid as virtual assistants, but they are not paid to follow Twitter. There wouldn’t be a point to having paid followers, because the goal is to distribute content widely.
There are plenty of people who after reading our widely-shared articles then choose to engage with our social media.