Very grateful for this post. Personalizing to contextualize, it’s amazing to see Vaidehi, Christina, Jack (and others I apologize for not remembering/knowing about) for consistently advocating for things that I gave up pursuing after hitting brick walls for years in the community starting in 2015. It takes courage (and almost certainly, tact) that I didn’t have at the time when I was running multiple projects in this space. Maybe someday I’ll say more about that if people would be interested
On the ‘coaching for co-founders of organizations’, Training For Good is exploring this area with their coaching trials (which I’m a part of), and in general this is something I feel well-positioned to tackle and I’m currently looking for support in being able to do so. I’ve recently finished trialing my coaching with more than a dozen EA leaders over the last few months. I feel the results are quite good, but I’m debating whether to post them publicly for privacy reasons. People who may be interested viewing the results can DM me! Keen to chat with anyone who wants to talk about supporting EA leadership
I completely agree, I’ve thought this ever since I joined the EA movement in 2013, and think this space (among others) is exceptionally neglected.
Some public examples of work I’ve done in this space include thinking about how to improve funder, project, and volunteer/team coordination as well as providing specialized services to the community. Given that this is a neglected area with little time and money available for people to make progress on it, I think it’s no surprise that the space has “a large ‘graveyard’ of untried proposals or projects.” I think the presence of such a graveyard is fairly indisputable, and with the current way coordination is done in the community, the only path forward appears to be greater advocacy for this area to receive more time and resources and/or improving coordination specifically among people that see this as a gap, both in terms of idea sharing and collaboration, and in terms of securing funding.
I continue to be interested in this area, and anyone who’s interested in potentially collaborating is welcome to get in touch!
Always nice to have a strong feeling about something and have your argument confirmed and strengthened by others.
I would say, there’s a lot of work to do in this space. I am happy to hear about the 2 recent CE charities pointing in this direction, and many more are needed.
One thing I would note here, I suspect that non-scalable solutions (e.g. headhunting) might not be able to keep up with demand in the foreseeable future. This would be because community building is particularly tractable, and the current level of efforts and money being put into community building could mean that it could grow faster than other parts of EA. The end result would that the types of infrastructure discussed above would continue to be out of reach for the majority of EA’s on the local level.
For this reason I suspect that local groups will have to build a lot of the services discussed here (skills training/headhunting/career planning) for themselves. Therefore I think we are locked into a trajectory of EA being a movement where most activity (research/learning/networking/jobs) exists in local groups, something most EA’s would find unimaginable at the moment.
As this is (probably) central to coordination: is there something like a clear decisionmaking structure to decide what “the community” actually wants (i.e., what is “ursuing EA goals”, concretely, in a given situation if there are trade-offs)? Is there an overview/explanation of this structure?
There are at least ~70 EA-aligned or adjacent organisations (including national/local/university groups)
Did you mean to say not including national/local/university groups? There are about 300 national/local/university groups (according to Ben West at CEA), and I would guess ~70 is about the number of orgs which identify as EA-aligned.
Very grateful for this post. Personalizing to contextualize, it’s amazing to see Vaidehi, Christina, Jack (and others I apologize for not remembering/knowing about) for consistently advocating for things that I gave up pursuing after hitting brick walls for years in the community starting in 2015. It takes courage (and almost certainly, tact) that I didn’t have at the time when I was running multiple projects in this space. Maybe someday I’ll say more about that if people would be interested
On the ‘coaching for co-founders of organizations’, Training For Good is exploring this area with their coaching trials (which I’m a part of), and in general this is something I feel well-positioned to tackle and I’m currently looking for support in being able to do so. I’ve recently finished trialing my coaching with more than a dozen EA leaders over the last few months. I feel the results are quite good, but I’m debating whether to post them publicly for privacy reasons. People who may be interested viewing the results can DM me! Keen to chat with anyone who wants to talk about supporting EA leadership
Thank you Tee! I’d be interested to learn more about the results. I sent you a message.
Love this post. In particular, I’d be keen for much closer collaboration on hiring!
Can someone tell me the author of this document here, called EA Common Application?
It’s me, Vaidehi (have edited the doc to reflect that)
I completely agree, I’ve thought this ever since I joined the EA movement in 2013, and think this space (among others) is exceptionally neglected.
Some public examples of work I’ve done in this space include thinking about how to improve funder, project, and volunteer/team coordination as well as providing specialized services to the community. Given that this is a neglected area with little time and money available for people to make progress on it, I think it’s no surprise that the space has “a large ‘graveyard’ of untried proposals or projects.” I think the presence of such a graveyard is fairly indisputable, and with the current way coordination is done in the community, the only path forward appears to be greater advocacy for this area to receive more time and resources and/or improving coordination specifically among people that see this as a gap, both in terms of idea sharing and collaboration, and in terms of securing funding.
I continue to be interested in this area, and anyone who’s interested in potentially collaborating is welcome to get in touch!
Always nice to have a strong feeling about something and have your argument confirmed and strengthened by others.
I would say, there’s a lot of work to do in this space. I am happy to hear about the 2 recent CE charities pointing in this direction, and many more are needed.
One thing I would note here, I suspect that non-scalable solutions (e.g. headhunting) might not be able to keep up with demand in the foreseeable future. This would be because community building is particularly tractable, and the current level of efforts and money being put into community building could mean that it could grow faster than other parts of EA. The end result would that the types of infrastructure discussed above would continue to be out of reach for the majority of EA’s on the local level.
For this reason I suspect that local groups will have to build a lot of the services discussed here (skills training/headhunting/career planning) for themselves. Therefore I think we are locked into a trajectory of EA being a movement where most activity (research/learning/networking/jobs) exists in local groups, something most EA’s would find unimaginable at the moment.
Thanks for this post. Here are some links discussing some related things, which I therefore thought might be of interest to the authors or to readers:
Collection of collections of resources relevant to (research) management, mentorship, training, etc.
“Covering the costs for EA people/orgs to go through non-EA management training courses, get books on management, or similar”, the section following that in the same doc, and the comments (which discuss the idea of creating new resources)
Quick notes/links on hiring/vetting
Discussion of the idea of a “Triplebyte for EA”:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/fSmBYeTyisyM9fkmD/p/MxXQ2bbL6KPrHDPtz#Improving_the_vetting_of__potential__researchers__and_or_better__sharing__that_vetting
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KesWktndWZfGcBbHZ/ea-infrastructure-fund-ask-us-anything?commentId=GkQnu2aT74RvyYLPr
Suggestion: EAs should post more summaries and collections
As this is (probably) central to coordination: is there something like a clear decisionmaking structure to decide what “the community” actually wants (i.e., what is “ursuing EA goals”, concretely, in a given situation if there are trade-offs)? Is there an overview/explanation of this structure?
Did you mean to say not including national/local/university groups? There are about 300 national/local/university groups (according to Ben West at CEA), and I would guess ~70 is about the number of orgs which identify as EA-aligned.
Good catch, Gina! :) Yes, it’s supposed to be “not including”. I’ve changed it now.