Thanks for writing this up! It’s nice to see a detailed plan and cost estimates ahead of time for the kind of community-building project that is often treated more informally.
A couple of notes/questions:
I may have missed this, but are you modeling the proposed organization of your network after any of the other national-level EA groups? It seems like there should be many lessons to learn, but I didn’t see any explicit mention of groups you’re emulating or groups you’ve spoken to.
I’m especially curious about this in regards to the IT infrastructure section of the proposal; it can be difficult to set up and maintain websites that require participation/input from many different groups, and I wonder how much of the event information could be handled with off-the-shelf tools (as you plan to use for your CRM software).
You have a lot of different projects and priorities. If this project were to be funded, what would you do first?
To what extent do you believe that EA movement growth in Germany has been hampered by a lack of coordination?
You mention that the population density of EAs is lower there than in the UK or Norway; I’m not sure how much of this is based on difficulty retaining members vs. difficulty reaching people in the first place. A coordination system seems especially helpful for retention (as interacting with a badly-run group is a really easy way for someone to lose involvement with EA), but I’m less clear on how much it would help with outreach.
As Aaron says, it seems that the team is doing a great job of forming a thorough and considered plan. Have you thought much about what a minimum viable product (as described eg in the Lean Start-up) would look like, and how to use that to test your assumptions? That might be particularly useful given the complexity of the project.
Dear Michelle, thank you for the kind words. I am answering from my own perspective and may not represent the full team.
We are basically already running as an MVP for ~3 month now while putting this plan together. It’s just a core team of people, coordinating and organizing events and working on a common infrastructure. We document quite a lot of what we do internally but it is not (yet) really accessible to people on the outside that’s why we aim to publish more blog posts like this in the future. We have a great team and despite limited resources I am constantly amazed by what we can pull together :)
We are also executing towards additional layers of functionality as we speak. For example, we have launched a survey to test some of our core assumptions and will conduct a series of open workshops focused on developing GEAN further (first one is this weekend). In terms of organizational structure we are trying to stay lean but will have to take the plunge of incorporating as this is one of the very reasons that we are embarking on this project at all – just based on our own (limited) activities we already have the need for a proper legal set up.
I hope this answers at least a substantial part of your question :)
Dear Aaron, thanks for taking the time to comment. I will answer your points quickly from my personal perspective, however, we will also collect all feedback to discuss it in the team as well which we may then collectively discuss in a future post or comment.
We are modeling after many different resources that we have access to (e.g., CEA thinking, posts on the EA forum, some personal conversations, personal experience and last but not least academic literature). For the sake of conveying „what we want to do“ and „why we want to do it“ rather than „why we want to do it the way we want to do“, we decided to not make this an academic paper but a more informal business plan. But if there is general interest in the whys we can write up a more academic exposition soon. We also really want to get in the habit of writing up our reasoning early and often… thus, thanks for providing some initiative ;)
Regarding IT infrastructure. We are not yet set on a specific tool or set of tools but are currently investigating different alternatives. Rest assured, we are very diligent at this task and really take a lot of care to find (or even develop) solutions that satisfy our (and the communities) requirements. For example, we are working on separate posts to justify and outline some of the values that guide our decisions here. However, while we have a great team with IT experience, we are somewhat bound by our financial situation and priorities. We may need to start with of the shelf components but migrate as we gain stability and resources.
This is a great point! Yes, we are ambitious and there is much to do! We are generally working on this on a volunteer basis at the moment which works out well to organize workshops and smaller events. However, setting up and running the legal and organizational infrastructure for an organization such as the one we outline in the business plan is better handled by one or two people working on this in at least part-time (better full-time) capacity. Thus, we would likely invest in funding appropriate people to be able to execute at an accelerated but sustainable pace. I hope this answer is precise enough, if not, I am happy to elaborate in more detail.
Based on my personal experience, I believe that there is a strong demand for coordination which is evident in the diverse team that we have already assembled. These are all people who value the exchange with other local groups and are motivated by working together in something larger than their local groups. Regarding movement growth, I believe that having „fun but valuable things to do“ besides reading, discussions and skill building will attract more people to community building activities, which in turn will make the reading, discussing and skill building more attractive. To grow sustainably there needs to be a self-supporting ecology of opportunities that fits to the local resource distribution.
Regarding outreach, I believe that I have covered the gist of it in my previous paragraph. Content-wise we are working on formats that are highly self-supporting, scalable and transferable to different regional contexts. While this is not an outreach activity per se, it‘s about setting up the infrastructure to be able to scale once momentum is there. I would hope to mainly use word of mouth to scale organically over time.
I think one of the main points that differentiates EA from other movements like F4F is that we want to have a better sense of what we are doing rather than just winging it. That‘s what we are working on and I thank you for helping us reflect more on this :)
Thanks for writing this up! It’s nice to see a detailed plan and cost estimates ahead of time for the kind of community-building project that is often treated more informally.
A couple of notes/questions:
I may have missed this, but are you modeling the proposed organization of your network after any of the other national-level EA groups? It seems like there should be many lessons to learn, but I didn’t see any explicit mention of groups you’re emulating or groups you’ve spoken to.
I’m especially curious about this in regards to the IT infrastructure section of the proposal; it can be difficult to set up and maintain websites that require participation/input from many different groups, and I wonder how much of the event information could be handled with off-the-shelf tools (as you plan to use for your CRM software).
You have a lot of different projects and priorities. If this project were to be funded, what would you do first?
To what extent do you believe that EA movement growth in Germany has been hampered by a lack of coordination?
You mention that the population density of EAs is lower there than in the UK or Norway; I’m not sure how much of this is based on difficulty retaining members vs. difficulty reaching people in the first place. A coordination system seems especially helpful for retention (as interacting with a badly-run group is a really easy way for someone to lose involvement with EA), but I’m less clear on how much it would help with outreach.
----
i work for CEA, but these views are my own.
As Aaron says, it seems that the team is doing a great job of forming a thorough and considered plan. Have you thought much about what a minimum viable product (as described eg in the Lean Start-up) would look like, and how to use that to test your assumptions? That might be particularly useful given the complexity of the project.
Dear Michelle, thank you for the kind words. I am answering from my own perspective and may not represent the full team.
We are basically already running as an MVP for ~3 month now while putting this plan together. It’s just a core team of people, coordinating and organizing events and working on a common infrastructure. We document quite a lot of what we do internally but it is not (yet) really accessible to people on the outside that’s why we aim to publish more blog posts like this in the future. We have a great team and despite limited resources I am constantly amazed by what we can pull together :)
We are also executing towards additional layers of functionality as we speak. For example, we have launched a survey to test some of our core assumptions and will conduct a series of open workshops focused on developing GEAN further (first one is this weekend). In terms of organizational structure we are trying to stay lean but will have to take the plunge of incorporating as this is one of the very reasons that we are embarking on this project at all – just based on our own (limited) activities we already have the need for a proper legal set up.
I hope this answers at least a substantial part of your question :)
Dear Aaron, thanks for taking the time to comment. I will answer your points quickly from my personal perspective, however, we will also collect all feedback to discuss it in the team as well which we may then collectively discuss in a future post or comment.
We are modeling after many different resources that we have access to (e.g., CEA thinking, posts on the EA forum, some personal conversations, personal experience and last but not least academic literature). For the sake of conveying „what we want to do“ and „why we want to do it“ rather than „why we want to do it the way we want to do“, we decided to not make this an academic paper but a more informal business plan. But if there is general interest in the whys we can write up a more academic exposition soon. We also really want to get in the habit of writing up our reasoning early and often… thus, thanks for providing some initiative ;)
Regarding IT infrastructure. We are not yet set on a specific tool or set of tools but are currently investigating different alternatives. Rest assured, we are very diligent at this task and really take a lot of care to find (or even develop) solutions that satisfy our (and the communities) requirements. For example, we are working on separate posts to justify and outline some of the values that guide our decisions here. However, while we have a great team with IT experience, we are somewhat bound by our financial situation and priorities. We may need to start with of the shelf components but migrate as we gain stability and resources.
This is a great point! Yes, we are ambitious and there is much to do! We are generally working on this on a volunteer basis at the moment which works out well to organize workshops and smaller events. However, setting up and running the legal and organizational infrastructure for an organization such as the one we outline in the business plan is better handled by one or two people working on this in at least part-time (better full-time) capacity. Thus, we would likely invest in funding appropriate people to be able to execute at an accelerated but sustainable pace. I hope this answer is precise enough, if not, I am happy to elaborate in more detail.
Based on my personal experience, I believe that there is a strong demand for coordination which is evident in the diverse team that we have already assembled. These are all people who value the exchange with other local groups and are motivated by working together in something larger than their local groups. Regarding movement growth, I believe that having „fun but valuable things to do“ besides reading, discussions and skill building will attract more people to community building activities, which in turn will make the reading, discussing and skill building more attractive. To grow sustainably there needs to be a self-supporting ecology of opportunities that fits to the local resource distribution.
Regarding outreach, I believe that I have covered the gist of it in my previous paragraph. Content-wise we are working on formats that are highly self-supporting, scalable and transferable to different regional contexts. While this is not an outreach activity per se, it‘s about setting up the infrastructure to be able to scale once momentum is there. I would hope to mainly use word of mouth to scale organically over time.
I think one of the main points that differentiates EA from other movements like F4F is that we want to have a better sense of what we are doing rather than just winging it. That‘s what we are working on and I thank you for helping us reflect more on this :)