Thanks for sharing this, really looking forward to the results of the survey.
As this event is for “a group of key people focused on meta / community-building work”, wouldn’t it make sense to include those doing community-building work ‘on the ground’? E.g., organisers that work for national, uni, city, or profession-based community-building organisations?
Rob provides some representation as head of CEA’s Groups Team, and obviously many of the attendees were working at the coalface in the recent past, but it still feels like a missed opportunity.
I recognise I’m probably biased because I co-run the Dutch national organisation.
Seeing the other replies, it seems the specific experience of running a national EA organisation is not specifically represented, although, in our (EA Germany) case, Anne Schulze is part of the community. Bigger EA organisations like ours (>100 members, supporting 27 local/uni groups, providing fiscal sponsorship/employer of record services, having a community health contact, etc.) might bring an additional perspective.
However, I see that having a representative for each sub-group would make for a big forum and that it’s okay to have people who represent multiple perspectives.
Yeah, every sub-group being present would be ridiculous, but I think one or two people who have previously done the work and are now working full-time supporting people who are still doing it would be a big improvement, e.g. Naomi/Amarins for national and city groups, or Jessica/Joris for uni groups (I’m not sure who the equivalent would be for professional groups like High Impact Engineers, etc.).
Perhaps an even better solution would be to have the CBG/UGAP/Infra Fund[1] recipients elect one or two people, as Rocky suggested, or even just select random representatives through sortition.
Thanks for sharing James! We did invite a few people doing more on-the-ground community building in various university/national groups, and some of them (e.g. Anne Schulze) are attending (note that not all attendees are public). But I’m not sure whether we got the balance right here, maybe we should have invited more such people.
Cheers! I haven’t met Anne, does she do community building work alongside her role as a Co-director at Effektiv Spenden? Because I don’t think I’d count Effektiv Spenden as a community building organisation, and certainly not in the way I’d count EA Germany as a community building organisation.
Makes sense! I was thinking of Effectiv Spenden, but I see that that’s an ambiguous example. Another public attendee who is doing on-the-ground community building is Kuhan Jeyapragasan (and I think that there were 1-2 others who were invited but can’t make it, or aren’t public).
Maybe I’m being picky but hasn’t it been quite a while since Kuhan was involved in the day-to-day running of EA Stanford? Wasn’t it around 2021? Because I don’t think I’d count SERI or CBAI as EA community building either.
(I appreciate this is probably very irritating if you’ve got 1-2 people from the 12 non-public names who are perfect examples of people who have been doing on-the-ground EA community building in the past two years or so).
Chiming in just to second James. There are dozens of us operating large regional meta EA organizations and I don’t see anyone representative of that perspective on the public list. I think it would be extremely valuable to have at least one leader from the CBG organizations present, ideally nominated by other CBGs such that they could represent our collective “on the ground” perspective. I’m happy to write a full list of why I think this perspective is valuable and not covered by the (also very valuable) perspectives in the public attendee list, if that would be useful.
Fwiw, I would be really interested in hearing why you think the currently on the ground running a city or national group perspective is not already covered and would be a valuable addition.
It seems very plausible to me that the event is missing this perspective, but, I think several listed attendees have past hands-on CB experience or work fairly closely with community builders e.g. Anne, myself, Dewi, Jan, Kuhan, Max Daniel, Max Dalton, Rob (I could be wrong about some of these people).
I’ve tried categorizing the public attendee list by their area of meta EA work. There are many different ways to categorize and this is just one version I put together quickly. It looks something like:
Funding
Fundraising
Grantmaking
Programming
Events
Education
Advising
Growth and Strategy
Service providers (Not included in the public list)
Comms (Not included in the public list)
Incubation
Community Health
Field-building
High-level meta EA
OP, CEA, EVF, LessWrong
“On the ground” meta EA (Not included in the public list)
Regional organizations
Professional organizations
University groups
Kuhan checks this last box but also has a cause-specific bent
While the people listed make critical decisions regarding resource allocation, granting, setting strategic directions, or providing critical infrastructure, their experience is fundamentally different from those who are directly involved in “on the ground” organizations. Vaidehi writes that “issues pertinent to the community need to have meaningful, two way, sustained engagement with the community.” “On the ground” organizations likely do this among the most of any orgs in the EA ecosystem.
I think the perspective of the wider breadth of “on the ground” community leaders is important, but I’ll speak to regional EA organizations, as that’s what I know best:
Before the FTX collapse, there was a heavy emphasis on making community building a long-term and sustainable career path. As a result, there are now dozens of people working professionally and often full-time on meta EA regional organizations (MEAROs).[1] By and large, we are a team of sorts: we’re in regular communication with each other, we have a shared and evolving sense of what MEAROs are and can be, and our strategic approaches intertwine and are mutually reinforcing. We essentially function as extended colleagues in a niche profession that feels very distinct to me from even other “on the ground” meta-EA community building (such as professional or uni groups). I don’t think anyone on the attendee list has run a MEARO, and certainly not in 2023.
There is a distinct zeitgeist among MEAROs. Consistently, I’ve been amazed how MEARO leaders seem to independently land on the same conclusions and strategic directions as our peers across the globe, “multiple discovery” if you will. This zeitgeist is not captured in larger EA discourse, from the Forum to conversations I have with non-MEARO community leaders. And this MERAO zeitgeist is evolving rapidly, such that it looks very different from even four months ago. As a result, I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been intimately involved in MEAROs in the past 3-6 months can represent our general shared perspective.
This shared perspective is born out of three main ingredients:
“On the ground” intensive feedback loops: We are engaging directly with community members at all stages of the funnel—across EA causes and professions—understanding their concerns, aspirations, and challenges in real time. This provides a richness of information on everything from how people are finding EA, to reactions to current events, to what HEAs see as their biggest needs from community builders. Think of us as carrying out unofficial and constant surveying on everything you’d want the broader EA community’s feedback on.
High-level EA org feedback: EA orgs and projects from throughout the ecosystem consistently correspond and collaborate with MEAROs in a way that provides us with a decently holistic and up-to-date understanding of where EA is and where it is headed.
MEARO-level strategy: It is our job to think about what MEAROs are and what they should be to achieve maximum impact. We arguably have the most mental bandwidth for this task of anyone in EA and, again, this is shifting dramatically as the EA community and the causes we care about rapidly change.
I think segments of #1 and #3 are captured by some of the publicly listed attendees, and I imagine the attendees have an equally good or even substantially better experience of #2, but it is the unique perspective that the combination of the three enables that I’m referencing.
At an event focused on meta coordination, it seems really important to have the perspective of those engaging constantly and deeply with “the EA masses,” immersed in regional strategy, and among the best able to shape the future of EA perception as the on-the-ground representatives of EA to thousands of people worldwide.
I talked this through with @James Herbert a bit and we discussed three possible cruxes here:
Are the people in the public attendee list doing different work from MEARO leaders?
For example, have they directly done things listed in Patrick’s comment, or advised hundreds of regular people in their geographic region?
If they have, how long is that knowledge valid?
For example, EA looks very different in September 2023 than it did in September 2022, and that changes the nature of some aspects of MEARO leadership more than others.
Does directly doing the type of work involved in operating a MEARO give you a different set of knowledge that is useful in contexts like the Mera Coordination Forum?
I hope the above gestures at why I think the answer is “yes” and believe most other MEARO leaders are likely to agree.
In addition to Rocky’s comment, there’s also the fact that only a tiny proportion of the attendees have experience with CB outside the anglosphere (Sjir and Jan are the two I know of, but I might be missing some). This seems disproportionate given that approx 40% of the 2022 survey respondents reside in non-English speaking countries.
To add a bit of context in terms of on-the-ground community building, I’ve been working on EA and AI safety community building at MIT and Harvard for most of the last two years (including now), though I have been more focused on AI safety field-building. I’ve also been helping out with advising for university EA groups, workshops/retreats for uni group organizers (both EA and AI safety), and organized beginning-of-year residencies at a few universities to support beginning-of-year EA outreach in 2021 and 2022 along with other miscellaneous EA CB projects (e.g. working with the CEA events team last year).
I do agree though that my experience is pretty different from that of regional/city/national group organizers.
Thanks for sharing this, really looking forward to the results of the survey.
As this event is for “a group of key people focused on meta / community-building work”, wouldn’t it make sense to include those doing community-building work ‘on the ground’? E.g., organisers that work for national, uni, city, or profession-based community-building organisations?
Rob provides some representation as head of CEA’s Groups Team, and obviously many of the attendees were working at the coalface in the recent past, but it still feels like a missed opportunity.
I recognise I’m probably biased because I co-run the Dutch national organisation.
Seeing the other replies, it seems the specific experience of running a national EA organisation is not specifically represented, although, in our (EA Germany) case, Anne Schulze is part of the community. Bigger EA organisations like ours (>100 members, supporting 27 local/uni groups, providing fiscal sponsorship/employer of record services, having a community health contact, etc.) might bring an additional perspective.
However, I see that having a representative for each sub-group would make for a big forum and that it’s okay to have people who represent multiple perspectives.
Thanks for sharing your perspective Patrick!
Yeah, every sub-group being present would be ridiculous, but I think one or two people who have previously done the work and are now working full-time supporting people who are still doing it would be a big improvement, e.g. Naomi/Amarins for national and city groups, or Jessica/Joris for uni groups (I’m not sure who the equivalent would be for professional groups like High Impact Engineers, etc.).
Perhaps an even better solution would be to have the CBG/UGAP/Infra Fund[1] recipients elect one or two people, as Rocky suggested, or even just select random representatives through sortition.
E.g. EA Denmark or EA Philippines
Thanks for sharing James! We did invite a few people doing more on-the-ground community building in various university/national groups, and some of them (e.g. Anne Schulze) are attending (note that not all attendees are public). But I’m not sure whether we got the balance right here, maybe we should have invited more such people.
Cheers! I haven’t met Anne, does she do community building work alongside her role as a Co-director at Effektiv Spenden? Because I don’t think I’d count Effektiv Spenden as a community building organisation, and certainly not in the way I’d count EA Germany as a community building organisation.
Makes sense! I was thinking of Effectiv Spenden, but I see that that’s an ambiguous example. Another public attendee who is doing on-the-ground community building is Kuhan Jeyapragasan (and I think that there were 1-2 others who were invited but can’t make it, or aren’t public).
Maybe I’m being picky but hasn’t it been quite a while since Kuhan was involved in the day-to-day running of EA Stanford? Wasn’t it around 2021? Because I don’t think I’d count SERI or CBAI as EA community building either.
(I appreciate this is probably very irritating if you’ve got 1-2 people from the 12 non-public names who are perfect examples of people who have been doing on-the-ground EA community building in the past two years or so).
Chiming in just to second James. There are dozens of us operating large regional meta EA organizations and I don’t see anyone representative of that perspective on the public list. I think it would be extremely valuable to have at least one leader from the CBG organizations present, ideally nominated by other CBGs such that they could represent our collective “on the ground” perspective. I’m happy to write a full list of why I think this perspective is valuable and not covered by the (also very valuable) perspectives in the public attendee list, if that would be useful.
Fwiw, I would be really interested in hearing why you think the currently on the ground running a city or national group perspective is not already covered and would be a valuable addition.
It seems very plausible to me that the event is missing this perspective, but, I think several listed attendees have past hands-on CB experience or work fairly closely with community builders e.g. Anne, myself, Dewi, Jan, Kuhan, Max Daniel, Max Dalton, Rob (I could be wrong about some of these people).
Thanks! I’m happy to expound.
I’ve tried categorizing the public attendee list by their area of meta EA work. There are many different ways to categorize and this is just one version I put together quickly. It looks something like:
Funding
Fundraising
Grantmaking
Programming
Events
Education
Advising
Growth and Strategy
Service providers (Not included in the public list)
Comms (Not included in the public list)
Incubation
Community Health
Field-building
High-level meta EA
OP, CEA, EVF, LessWrong
“On the ground” meta EA (Not included in the public list)
Regional organizations
Professional organizations
University groups
Kuhan checks this last box but also has a cause-specific bent
While the people listed make critical decisions regarding resource allocation, granting, setting strategic directions, or providing critical infrastructure, their experience is fundamentally different from those who are directly involved in “on the ground” organizations. Vaidehi writes that “issues pertinent to the community need to have meaningful, two way, sustained engagement with the community.” “On the ground” organizations likely do this among the most of any orgs in the EA ecosystem.
I think the perspective of the wider breadth of “on the ground” community leaders is important, but I’ll speak to regional EA organizations, as that’s what I know best:
Before the FTX collapse, there was a heavy emphasis on making community building a long-term and sustainable career path. As a result, there are now dozens of people working professionally and often full-time on meta EA regional organizations (MEAROs).[1] By and large, we are a team of sorts: we’re in regular communication with each other, we have a shared and evolving sense of what MEAROs are and can be, and our strategic approaches intertwine and are mutually reinforcing. We essentially function as extended colleagues in a niche profession that feels very distinct to me from even other “on the ground” meta-EA community building (such as professional or uni groups). I don’t think anyone on the attendee list has run a MEARO, and certainly not in 2023.
There is a distinct zeitgeist among MEAROs. Consistently, I’ve been amazed how MEARO leaders seem to independently land on the same conclusions and strategic directions as our peers across the globe, “multiple discovery” if you will. This zeitgeist is not captured in larger EA discourse, from the Forum to conversations I have with non-MEARO community leaders. And this MERAO zeitgeist is evolving rapidly, such that it looks very different from even four months ago. As a result, I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been intimately involved in MEAROs in the past 3-6 months can represent our general shared perspective.
This shared perspective is born out of three main ingredients:
“On the ground” intensive feedback loops: We are engaging directly with community members at all stages of the funnel—across EA causes and professions—understanding their concerns, aspirations, and challenges in real time. This provides a richness of information on everything from how people are finding EA, to reactions to current events, to what HEAs see as their biggest needs from community builders. Think of us as carrying out unofficial and constant surveying on everything you’d want the broader EA community’s feedback on.
High-level EA org feedback: EA orgs and projects from throughout the ecosystem consistently correspond and collaborate with MEAROs in a way that provides us with a decently holistic and up-to-date understanding of where EA is and where it is headed.
MEARO-level strategy: It is our job to think about what MEAROs are and what they should be to achieve maximum impact. We arguably have the most mental bandwidth for this task of anyone in EA and, again, this is shifting dramatically as the EA community and the causes we care about rapidly change.
I think segments of #1 and #3 are captured by some of the publicly listed attendees, and I imagine the attendees have an equally good or even substantially better experience of #2, but it is the unique perspective that the combination of the three enables that I’m referencing.
At an event focused on meta coordination, it seems really important to have the perspective of those engaging constantly and deeply with “the EA masses,” immersed in regional strategy, and among the best able to shape the future of EA perception as the on-the-ground representatives of EA to thousands of people worldwide.
I talked this through with @James Herbert a bit and we discussed three possible cruxes here:
Are the people in the public attendee list doing different work from MEARO leaders?
For example, have they directly done things listed in Patrick’s comment, or advised hundreds of regular people in their geographic region?
If they have, how long is that knowledge valid?
For example, EA looks very different in September 2023 than it did in September 2022, and that changes the nature of some aspects of MEARO leadership more than others.
Does directly doing the type of work involved in operating a MEARO give you a different set of knowledge that is useful in contexts like the Mera Coordination Forum?
I hope the above gestures at why I think the answer is “yes” and believe most other MEARO leaders are likely to agree.
Yes, I totally just coined this acronym.
In addition to Rocky’s comment, there’s also the fact that only a tiny proportion of the attendees have experience with CB outside the anglosphere (Sjir and Jan are the two I know of, but I might be missing some). This seems disproportionate given that approx 40% of the 2022 survey respondents reside in non-English speaking countries.
If you’re willing to write up some of your on the ground perspective and it seem valuable, we’d be happy to share it with attendees!
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking things like:
What changes in community members attitudes might ‘leaders’ not be tracking?
From your engagement with ‘leaders’ and community members, what seem to be the biggest misunderstandings?
What cheap actions could leaders take that might have a really positive influence on the community?
I’ll DM you with info on on how to share such a write up, if you’re interested.
Thank you, Michel! I’m replying over DM.
To add a bit of context in terms of on-the-ground community building, I’ve been working on EA and AI safety community building at MIT and Harvard for most of the last two years (including now), though I have been more focused on AI safety field-building. I’ve also been helping out with advising for university EA groups, workshops/retreats for uni group organizers (both EA and AI safety), and organized beginning-of-year residencies at a few universities to support beginning-of-year EA outreach in 2021 and 2022 along with other miscellaneous EA CB projects (e.g. working with the CEA events team last year).
I do agree though that my experience is pretty different from that of regional/city/national group organizers.
Thanks Kuhan!