I’m somewhat confused about what led you to this conclusion. I was the co-director of EA Germany for two years, an organization that is similarly structured. When I compare it to the memberless nonprofits where I’m a board member, the overhead for organizing a general assembly has been greater, yet it hasn’t resulted in significant decision-making input from the members.
The post’s main claim is relatively modest: “you don’t need to panic about democracy in EA.” Speaking for myself, I contributed to this post because I have the impression that often, when someone suggests increased democratisation, the responses are mostly, “oh, that will never work because of this, that, and the other reason” before moving on. In writing this post, I wanted to update people away from that by providing an example of where democratic elements have worked reasonably well. Nonetheless, I agree that there will be examples of organisations where it doesn’t work as well, and maybe EA Germany is one of those organisations.
In the rest of your comment, it feels like you’re mainly questioning the value of national community building orgs rather than the value of democratising national community building orgs. That’s a reasonable thing to question, but I think it’s a separate discussion. Unless I’m misunderstanding you?
The post’s main claim is relatively modest: “you don’t need to panic about democracy in EA.” Speaking for myself, I contributed to this post because I have the impression that often, when someone suggests increased democratisation, the responses are mostly, “oh, that will never work because of this, that, and the other reason” before moving on. In writing this post, I wanted to update people away from that by providing an example of where democratic elements have worked reasonably well. Nonetheless, I agree that there will be examples of organisations where it doesn’t work as well, and maybe EA Germany is one of those organisations.
In the rest of your comment, it feels like you’re mainly questioning the value of national community building orgs rather than the value of democratising national community building orgs. That’s a reasonable thing to question, but I think it’s a separate discussion. Unless I’m misunderstanding you?