This is really more of a draft project than a draft post. I did most of this work many months ago and just never got around to wrapping it up and sharing it. I ended up (temporarily) removing a lot of pages that were half-finished so that I could hit send. Expect more content soon!
| This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. |
| This is a Forum post that I wouldn't have posted without the nudge of Draft Amnesty Week. Fire away! (But be nice, as usual) |
TLDR
📢 Check out the new website and the new online community space. Share it with all your engineer friends!
It's all new, open-source, and volunteer-run. So bear with us and help us grow!
Hang on - what happened?
High Impact Engineers was an organisation focused on increasing the quantity of impactful work done by physical engineers. It was founded in 2022 by Jessica Wen and Sean Lawrence.
There was a website, a podcast, career advising, lots of writing, a newsletter, and a community!
High Impact Engineers lost funding in 2024. The Squarespace subscription of the old website expired a while ago, and suddenly it was almost like it had never been there.
That's sad!
This is super sad, because physical engineers can do great things! Think about PPE, air quality improvements, higher welfare animal agriculture systems, and low carbon manufacturing/transport/agriculture, for example. Engineers are also often great generalists that can quickly pick up highly technical topics.
When I talk to non-software engineers at Effective Altruism events, they often share that they feel alone and that there aren't many resources for them. The Effective Altruism community hasn't been doing a great job supporting engineers. Let's change that!
So what's there now?
There is a new website!
We might move the website to the old domain, but I currently don't have access. A lot of content from the old page is not there at the moment. This is partially because it's in an annoying format for migration, and partially because some of the content is a bit outdated. I hope to get around to moving more content soon.
We also now have a new online space for the community!
Please don't be shy! Say hi, share what you're working on, comment on something, and maybe even consider signing up for updates by "watching" this repo.
It looks a little empty!
Yup. This is all from-the-community and for-the-community, baby. It only grows if we grow it.
So join the discussion!
Or contribute some other way!
I am currently the only admin and maintainer of all of this. But I am planning to onboard a few more GitHub maintainers in the next few months, so this is all a bit more future-proof. Get in touch if you think you'd be interested in that. Or just start making pull requests :)
Great to see this being picked up! Two questions from me:
Thanks! Some reasons I chose GitHub Discussions:
Slack seems expensive and/or more appropriate for real-time conversation.
I do appreciate that this is a bit unusual, but it seems like the perfect platform to me!
I love that High Impact Engineers is back and I generally like a forum-style place over Slack, but I want to push back specifically on "many engineers have a GitHub account" -- especially since your goal is to be welcoming to non-software-engineers, I wouldn't make this assumption! I was a materials engineering undergrad and none of my classes/internships/research projects used GitHub. Maybe it's really taken over in the last 10 years or something, but if not, you might want to consider being a bit more 101-level with the GitHub stuff, e.g. not using jargon like 'pull' or 'repo' without explanation -- when I see that kind of thing, at least personally my immediate reaction is "oh, this is a space for software engineers".
Thanks for the feedback! Maybe I overestimate how common GitHub use is.
Having said that, GitHub Discussions as a forum space requires no knowledge of git or coding. I think the interface is even simpler than the EA forum.
Contributing to the website is definitely going to be more accessible to people with some software experience. Although I am totally willing to onboard people with no prior experience if they're excited to learn!
I'll look into making the contribution guidelines on the website sound more welcoming.
I'm open to collab suggestions! Did you have a particular idea in mind?
I forwarded the post to Nina from HIP. But I’d recommend you also reach out to them directly: https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/contact-us
Don’t have specific ideas in mind but there’s definitly decent overlap. I think having a call about what they see as gaps and how HIE could fill these would be very valuable.
Thanks for doing this! There are new opportunities for physical engineers in biosecurity here.