I liked this post, but I had expected another one given the title.
The post only describes the location of the projects, but not so much what they are doing. I think it would be very valuable to see which type of projects are getting funded. What are e.g. EA Oxford and EA Geneva doing that warrants more support relative to other projects?
I have the intuition that what they are primarily being funded for is more likely to be network-building (increasing the community’s connections to influential people, including making community members more influential)than community-building (a longer-term investment into tight networks that facilitate mutual support). I am not sure about how funding is actually distributed between these two types and what the optimal allocation would be though. Without more information it’s hard to discuss.
I played around with the data and added categories here.
Some interesting results from the top 3 categories:
Community Building 30.23% of all grants for Community building (local) go to European groups, 10.20% to Oxbridge/London, 4.31% to the rest of the world and 0.72% to the Bay
EA Organisations 34.18% to London/Oxbridge based organisations: 16% of all grants have gone to EA pledge organisations (fundraising), 14.82% to 80K, 1.21% to HIPE. The remaining 3.08% to the Rest of the World (RCForward and Rethink Priorities).
Academic Research 7.33% to London/Oxbridge, 1.08% to the Bay, 0.58% to the Rest of the World
To Siebe’s question of what EA Geneva and EA Oxford is doing: Geneva received a grant to do local policy research (0.54% of total funding, 7.7% of Geneva’s total funding received—the remaining 92.3% went to community building). EA Oxford’s most recent grant went towards student career planning in addition to community building.
Note: I used the same regional categories and method for calculating CBG allocations as OP. I’ve filtered out the $120,000 grant that went from CBG from the meta fund to avoid double counting.
I’ve also labeled community infrastructure as separate from community building to differentiate between local community building and building community tools like the EA Forum, Effective Thesis, etc.
I totally agree! There are many factors that are relevant to CB funding decisions next to location of projects. For example, just because there are many local groups in a country doesn’t mean that they actually require dedicated funding for personnel. It really depends on whether promising people and projects make sense for a specific context.
Thus, while I appreciate the effort and actually share some of the same intuitions about the CB funding situation, I fear that the argument made in the post is quite weak. That’s a shame because I really think there is a discussion to be had here and hopefully the post can act as conversation starter. I do appreciate some of the comments here, who seem to take the discussion beyond the actual content of the post.
What I would love to see is a discussion on the general structure of the CB funding pipeline along the lines of Jan Kulveit’s post on national level EA orgs. Wouldn’t it make sense to work toward delegating CB funding to the people with the best information about CB efforts via regranting?
I liked this post, but I had expected another one given the title.
The post only describes the location of the projects, but not so much what they are doing. I think it would be very valuable to see which type of projects are getting funded. What are e.g. EA Oxford and EA Geneva doing that warrants more support relative to other projects?
I have the intuition that what they are primarily being funded for is more likely to be network-building (increasing the community’s connections to influential people, including making community members more influential) than community-building (a longer-term investment into tight networks that facilitate mutual support). I am not sure about how funding is actually distributed between these two types and what the optimal allocation would be though. Without more information it’s hard to discuss.
I played around with the data and added categories here.
Some interesting results from the top 3 categories:
Community Building 30.23% of all grants for Community building (local) go to European groups, 10.20% to Oxbridge/London, 4.31% to the rest of the world and 0.72% to the Bay
EA Organisations 34.18% to London/Oxbridge based organisations: 16% of all grants have gone to EA pledge organisations (fundraising), 14.82% to 80K, 1.21% to HIPE. The remaining 3.08% to the Rest of the World (RCForward and Rethink Priorities).
Academic Research 7.33% to London/Oxbridge, 1.08% to the Bay, 0.58% to the Rest of the World
To Siebe’s question of what EA Geneva and EA Oxford is doing: Geneva received a grant to do local policy research (0.54% of total funding, 7.7% of Geneva’s total funding received—the remaining 92.3% went to community building). EA Oxford’s most recent grant went towards student career planning in addition to community building.
Note: I used the same regional categories and method for calculating CBG allocations as OP. I’ve filtered out the $120,000 grant that went from CBG from the meta fund to avoid double counting. I’ve also labeled community infrastructure as separate from community building to differentiate between local community building and building community tools like the EA Forum, Effective Thesis, etc.
I like this additional categorization, the “community infrastructure” distinction seems valuable. Thanks for sharing!
I totally agree! There are many factors that are relevant to CB funding decisions next to location of projects. For example, just because there are many local groups in a country doesn’t mean that they actually require dedicated funding for personnel. It really depends on whether promising people and projects make sense for a specific context.
Thus, while I appreciate the effort and actually share some of the same intuitions about the CB funding situation, I fear that the argument made in the post is quite weak. That’s a shame because I really think there is a discussion to be had here and hopefully the post can act as conversation starter. I do appreciate some of the comments here, who seem to take the discussion beyond the actual content of the post.
What I would love to see is a discussion on the general structure of the CB funding pipeline along the lines of Jan Kulveit’s post on national level EA orgs. Wouldn’t it make sense to work toward delegating CB funding to the people with the best information about CB efforts via regranting?
I agree that this seems like a useful analysis—any chance you have time to read through the grants and write it up?