As someone who is a funded community builder part time, it’s extremely difficult to do this kind of work. Community building is extremely competitive to get funding, and running a local group takes a lot out of you. Plus the career/funding situation is precarious and not exactly great for setting up a lucrative career path, so unfortunately I think a lot of people see community building as a temporary position or a means to getting more clout in EA.
This is especially true of university organizers since by the nature of their position, they will only be organizing temporarily.
I’d like the community building movement, especially the paid organizers, to coordinate more. I think that if we could have an annual meetup country by country, perhaps people could coordinate and piece out larger projects—for example a group of 5 paid organizers could pool some funds or work on building an ethics framework together.
EA generally has an issue where people say “if this is a problem, why don’t you go do it?” I think if we focused more on coordinating and letting people solve problems as a group, we could get a lot more done.
I don’t mean to discount your experience, but from my experience something like running a small democratically allocated fund seems pretty doable by a single person as a fun side project with some spreadsheets (probably less work than writing a 20000 word critical essay...). If you want to get serious, sure, the work ramps up. But the point is to find out whether people are interested in a low cost way.
EA generally has an issue where people say “if this is a problem, why don’t you go do it?”
I think we are probably sensitive to different things :) I feel like I see a lot more people saying “why doesn’t Someone (usually ‘the EA movement’, which isn’t, you know, an agent) just implement my pet idea?”. Probably people say both :upside-down-smile:
I organize part time while also working full time as the head of sales at a tech startup. I really don’t have time to coordinate this type of thing, but if I could contribute a few hours a month here or there I’d be happy to do it.
The problem is most people don’t have the skillset to do sales, build spreadsheets, and identify funds. It takes either an incredibly talented person with a lot of time, or a group with different skills complementing each other.
As someone who is a funded community builder part time, it’s extremely difficult to do this kind of work. Community building is extremely competitive to get funding, and running a local group takes a lot out of you. Plus the career/funding situation is precarious and not exactly great for setting up a lucrative career path, so unfortunately I think a lot of people see community building as a temporary position or a means to getting more clout in EA.
This is especially true of university organizers since by the nature of their position, they will only be organizing temporarily.
I’d like the community building movement, especially the paid organizers, to coordinate more. I think that if we could have an annual meetup country by country, perhaps people could coordinate and piece out larger projects—for example a group of 5 paid organizers could pool some funds or work on building an ethics framework together.
EA generally has an issue where people say “if this is a problem, why don’t you go do it?” I think if we focused more on coordinating and letting people solve problems as a group, we could get a lot more done.
I don’t mean to discount your experience, but from my experience something like running a small democratically allocated fund seems pretty doable by a single person as a fun side project with some spreadsheets (probably less work than writing a 20000 word critical essay...). If you want to get serious, sure, the work ramps up. But the point is to find out whether people are interested in a low cost way.
I think we are probably sensitive to different things :) I feel like I see a lot more people saying “why doesn’t Someone (usually ‘the EA movement’, which isn’t, you know, an agent) just implement my pet idea?”. Probably people say both :upside-down-smile:
I organize part time while also working full time as the head of sales at a tech startup. I really don’t have time to coordinate this type of thing, but if I could contribute a few hours a month here or there I’d be happy to do it.
The problem is most people don’t have the skillset to do sales, build spreadsheets, and identify funds. It takes either an incredibly talented person with a lot of time, or a group with different skills complementing each other.