(Found this in my drafts and figured I’d pay it anyways even though it is a year late)
One thing I noiced in this piece:
I think maybe the assumption “you” (in the post) make is that meta EA (or movement building to be more precise) is that it is undertaken by a small group of highly coordinated actors pursuing some vaguely defined high level goal.
Instead, I think it’s more like a mid-sized group of semi-coordinated actors who are trying to pursue their own narrowly-defined organizational goals. For example, Giving What We Can recruits new pledgers and is trying to postively influence donation culture and spread positive values, EA London provides coordination and support to the EA London community, Czech EA is doing community building, developing new projects and running events for the European EA/Rationalist communities, CEA is focusing on onboarding students and young professionals.
So there isn’t 1 target audience, end-game or set of actions, although collectively the end goal is something like “make the world a better place” since we are part of the same movement with the same broad goal.
Of course, if you’re more narrowly talking about the goals or purpose of community building more specifically—e.g. what is the value of bringing
That being said, I agree that there is a lot of work to be done to make meta EA efforts more systematic, better modeled, and more rigorous M&E.
(Found this in my drafts and figured I’d pay it anyways even though it is a year late)
One thing I noiced in this piece:
I think maybe the assumption “you” (in the post) make is that meta EA (or movement building to be more precise) is that it is undertaken by a small group of highly coordinated actors pursuing some vaguely defined high level goal.
Instead, I think it’s more like a mid-sized group of semi-coordinated actors who are trying to pursue their own narrowly-defined organizational goals. For example, Giving What We Can recruits new pledgers and is trying to postively influence donation culture and spread positive values, EA London provides coordination and support to the EA London community, Czech EA is doing community building, developing new projects and running events for the European EA/Rationalist communities, CEA is focusing on onboarding students and young professionals.
So there isn’t 1 target audience, end-game or set of actions, although collectively the end goal is something like “make the world a better place” since we are part of the same movement with the same broad goal.
Of course, if you’re more narrowly talking about the goals or purpose of community building more specifically—e.g. what is the value of bringing
That being said, I agree that there is a lot of work to be done to make meta EA efforts more systematic, better modeled, and more rigorous M&E.