Thanks for the thorough write-up! I’m glad to see this initiative taking shape. As we’ve briefly discussed earlier this year, I believe there are some low-hanging fruits to pluck with respect to community management in Germany, especially after we at EAF have deprioritised community building and local group support.
From the list of planned activities you describe, I am most excited about facilitating retreats, providing some support for new groups, and aiming to become a tax-exempt association to facilitate financial management. In general, facilitating coordination and exchange among local groups has often seemed valuable to me in the past.
At the same time, I’d caution against providing too many services too soon. My skepticism is grounded mainly in my experience that local groups often don’t use tools offered to them—like a CRM or a website—reliably. This is in part because turnover is usually high and non-essential things often don’t get handed over, and in part because motivation and available time tends to fluctuate strongly. (On a side note: This may be hard, but ideally such effects are also taken into account when surveying groups about their needs.) I’ve often seen groups drop things after an initial burst of motivation and interest. This can have negative effects if they would counterfactually have focused more on more key aspects of local group management.
For these reasons I’d recommend using an iterative approach, focusing initially on the provision of fairly basic infrastructure and a small number of key events. If this goes well and you have more capacitiy and notice more demand, you can expand your activities step-by-step.
With respect to the idea of an introductory workshop series, and perhaps also relevant to other planned activities: I’ve become less optimistic about proactive outreach efforts by local groups since I wrote down my toughts on running a local group a little over a year ago (link). In particular, I probably wouldn’t endorse several of the recommendations I made in the ‘Outreach’ section anymore, as well as the idea of running an ‘EA seminar’ for new members. With respect to the seminar/workshop series, I’ve become less sure about the value of efforts trying to “teach” EA ideas to potentially interested people. People who are a good fit for a group in the long run are often those who also have sufficient motivation to read about and engage with relevant ideas on their own. I’m not highly confident in this, though, and people who have themselves run such seminars are be in a better position to evaluate their value.
thank you for your insightful remarks, I hope that you find some of the things that we talked about already reflected in the plan :) We try to listen and incorporate feedback, especially, when there is experience to back it up! Again, I am answering from own perspective and may not represent the full team.
Regarding your concerns for services, we are very aware of this and now that I think about it, it may have been useful to add our one-year roadmap to illustrate how we want to start our initiative. Rest assured we are very much following along the lines that you outline at the moment. We are organizing an Unconference style retreat, a community building retreat, additional advanced workshops and we are also considering to organize a EAGx in Germany again next year (this is still more dependent on what other players are doing, though). So, next to setting up the basic infrastructure most of our efforts are focused on delivering key events with high expected value.
Regarding your concerns for outreach, at the moment we seem to be following a very inward looking approach, trying to improve community building within EA in Germany (“the product”). Based on improving this “product” we hope to organically scale by word of mouth. However, there is also the possibility of investigating other outreach opportunities as time goes on.
I personally, have a slightly different perception regarding introductory workshops as we have had great experience with those. Things like basic rationality training combined with an EA touch or career workshops for beginners seem to be in high demand and are generally perceived as useful or interesting. I do agree, though, that only a small fraction of those people who attend make the jump across the chasm to become deeply involved EAs. That’s an interesting phenomenon to study and I am not entirely sure what to make of it yet. There are many (competing) perspectives one can take regarding the “desirability” of this situation and how to move forward from here. I can’t answer comprehensively in this comment, but it is delightful topic for a set of good conversations or even a series of blog posts ;)
I hope I could answer some of your concerns. If something needs further exploration, I am happy to try again :)
EAF deprioritised community building to focus more on its core priority: research on preventing s-risks from AI. Last year seemed to be a good time to hand over community building as CEA had recently increased its capacity in this area (with the community building grants, and additions to the groups team). EAF is still hosting a resource overview on the non-EAF-specific German EA landing page, though perhaps this can be transfered ot a GEAN website at some point.
You can read more about our EAF’s plans for 2019 in this post.
Thanks for the thorough write-up! I’m glad to see this initiative taking shape. As we’ve briefly discussed earlier this year, I believe there are some low-hanging fruits to pluck with respect to community management in Germany, especially after we at EAF have deprioritised community building and local group support.
From the list of planned activities you describe, I am most excited about facilitating retreats, providing some support for new groups, and aiming to become a tax-exempt association to facilitate financial management. In general, facilitating coordination and exchange among local groups has often seemed valuable to me in the past.
At the same time, I’d caution against providing too many services too soon. My skepticism is grounded mainly in my experience that local groups often don’t use tools offered to them—like a CRM or a website—reliably. This is in part because turnover is usually high and non-essential things often don’t get handed over, and in part because motivation and available time tends to fluctuate strongly. (On a side note: This may be hard, but ideally such effects are also taken into account when surveying groups about their needs.) I’ve often seen groups drop things after an initial burst of motivation and interest. This can have negative effects if they would counterfactually have focused more on more key aspects of local group management.
For these reasons I’d recommend using an iterative approach, focusing initially on the provision of fairly basic infrastructure and a small number of key events. If this goes well and you have more capacitiy and notice more demand, you can expand your activities step-by-step.
With respect to the idea of an introductory workshop series, and perhaps also relevant to other planned activities: I’ve become less optimistic about proactive outreach efforts by local groups since I wrote down my toughts on running a local group a little over a year ago (link). In particular, I probably wouldn’t endorse several of the recommendations I made in the ‘Outreach’ section anymore, as well as the idea of running an ‘EA seminar’ for new members. With respect to the seminar/workshop series, I’ve become less sure about the value of efforts trying to “teach” EA ideas to potentially interested people. People who are a good fit for a group in the long run are often those who also have sufficient motivation to read about and engage with relevant ideas on their own. I’m not highly confident in this, though, and people who have themselves run such seminars are be in a better position to evaluate their value.
Dear Tobias,
thank you for your insightful remarks, I hope that you find some of the things that we talked about already reflected in the plan :) We try to listen and incorporate feedback, especially, when there is experience to back it up! Again, I am answering from own perspective and may not represent the full team.
Regarding your concerns for services, we are very aware of this and now that I think about it, it may have been useful to add our one-year roadmap to illustrate how we want to start our initiative. Rest assured we are very much following along the lines that you outline at the moment. We are organizing an Unconference style retreat, a community building retreat, additional advanced workshops and we are also considering to organize a EAGx in Germany again next year (this is still more dependent on what other players are doing, though). So, next to setting up the basic infrastructure most of our efforts are focused on delivering key events with high expected value.
Regarding your concerns for outreach, at the moment we seem to be following a very inward looking approach, trying to improve community building within EA in Germany (“the product”). Based on improving this “product” we hope to organically scale by word of mouth. However, there is also the possibility of investigating other outreach opportunities as time goes on.
I personally, have a slightly different perception regarding introductory workshops as we have had great experience with those. Things like basic rationality training combined with an EA touch or career workshops for beginners seem to be in high demand and are generally perceived as useful or interesting. I do agree, though, that only a small fraction of those people who attend make the jump across the chasm to become deeply involved EAs. That’s an interesting phenomenon to study and I am not entirely sure what to make of it yet. There are many (competing) perspectives one can take regarding the “desirability” of this situation and how to move forward from here. I can’t answer comprehensively in this comment, but it is delightful topic for a set of good conversations or even a series of blog posts ;)
I hope I could answer some of your concerns. If something needs further exploration, I am happy to try again :)
What’s EAF focusing on now and why did it decide to deprioritise community building?
EAF deprioritised community building to focus more on its core priority: research on preventing s-risks from AI. Last year seemed to be a good time to hand over community building as CEA had recently increased its capacity in this area (with the community building grants, and additions to the groups team). EAF is still hosting a resource overview on the non-EAF-specific German EA landing page, though perhaps this can be transfered ot a GEAN website at some point.
You can read more about our EAF’s plans for 2019 in this post.