Picture it. The year is 2035 (9 years after the RSI near-miss event triggered the first Great Revolt). You ride your bitchin’ electric scooter to the EA-adjacent community center where you and your friends co-work on a local voter awareness campaign, startup idea, or just a fun painting or whatever. An intentional community.
One could think of religious congregations as a sort of rough analogue here. At least in theory, they have both member-service and broader-benefit objectives (of course, your opinion on the extent to which this is true may depend on the congregation and religion in question). While something that near-exclusively benefits the broader community may get external funding (e.g., the church soup kitchen), at least in the US everything else is probably being paid for by member/attendee donations.
And in a sense, the self-funding mechanism provides something of a check on concerns that a membership-based democratic organization will weight its members’ welfare too much. If self-funding is predominant, then the members have implicitly decided that the extent to which they value the personal benefits of the organization plus their estimate of the organization’s broader altruist achievements justifies the expenses.
In contrast, I would be hesitant to draw too many conclusions from EA Norway’s ability to attract non-member/supporter funding. As a practical matter, “EA org in a small country” may be a pseudo-monopoly in the sense that having multiple organizations in the same ecological niche may not be healthy or sustainable. External funder decisions could merely reflect the reality that the niche is occupied adequately enough, rather than a belief that the EA Norway approach would outcompete alternative approaches. That’s relevant insofar as other meta functions may have a larger organizational carrying capacity than “EA org in a small country” does.
One could think of religious congregations as a sort of rough analogue here. At least in theory, they have both member-service and broader-benefit objectives (of course, your opinion on the extent to which this is true may depend on the congregation and religion in question). While something that near-exclusively benefits the broader community may get external funding (e.g., the church soup kitchen), at least in the US everything else is probably being paid for by member/attendee donations.
And in a sense, the self-funding mechanism provides something of a check on concerns that a membership-based democratic organization will weight its members’ welfare too much. If self-funding is predominant, then the members have implicitly decided that the extent to which they value the personal benefits of the organization plus their estimate of the organization’s broader altruist achievements justifies the expenses.
In contrast, I would be hesitant to draw too many conclusions from EA Norway’s ability to attract non-member/supporter funding. As a practical matter, “EA org in a small country” may be a pseudo-monopoly in the sense that having multiple organizations in the same ecological niche may not be healthy or sustainable. External funder decisions could merely reflect the reality that the niche is occupied adequately enough, rather than a belief that the EA Norway approach would outcompete alternative approaches. That’s relevant insofar as other meta functions may have a larger organizational carrying capacity than “EA org in a small country” does.