I’m confused about the mathematics of a a fee-paying membership society. I’m having a hard time seeing how that would generate more than a modest fraction of current revenues.
It’s not clear what the “central convening and coordinating parts” are. Neither Current-CEA nor Reformed-CEA would have a monopoly on tasks like funding community builders, funding/running conferences, and so on. They are just another vendor who the donors can choose to hire for those purposes. There is and would be no democratic mandate that donors who would like to fund X, Y, and Z are obliged to go through CEA.
I think your model is correct insofar as the membership society could assert independent control of certain epistemically critical functions that are relatively less reliant on funding (e.g., the Forum).
The extent to which “convening and coordinating” is effective may depend on whether there is money behind those efforts. Stated more directly, to what extent are CEA’s efforts in these areas boosted by the well-known (general yet strong) alignment between CEA and the major funder in the ecosystem? Would Reformed-CEA enjoy the same boost?
I used to work at EA Norway, which is a fee-paying membership society, and thought it might be useful to share more on how our funding worked. This is just meant as an example, and not as an argument for or against membership societies. (Here’s a longer comment explaining how we organise things at EA Norway.)
I can’t speak to EA Norway’s current situation, as I no longer have any position at EA Norway (other than being a paying member). However, I can say what it was like in 2018-2021 when I was Executive Director (ED). The total income from the membership fee roughly covered the cost of the general assembly. Most of our funding came from a community building grant from the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). However, the board made sure to fundraise enough from private donors for my salary. The two main reasons for this was to I) diversify our funding, and II) enable us to make longer term plans than CEAs grant periods.
When the board gave approval to accept the community building grant from CEA, we discussed that if at any point we did not want to follow CEAs guidelines and success metrics, we would pay back the remainder of the grant. This was definitely easier for us to say and truly mean when we had covered the ED’s salary from other sources, as it meant that if we were to return the funding, we would still have at least one employee. We never ended up disagreeing so much with CEA that we wanted to return the funds, though we were definitely very vocal about any disagreements we had with the groups team at CEA and did push for some changes.
I’m confused about the mathematics of a a fee-paying membership society. I’m having a hard time seeing how that would generate more than a modest fraction of current revenues.
I’m confused why you think this is required, I don’t think Michael implied it would.
The society wouldn’t be a good replacement for CEA unless it could attract significant major donor support. As the next paragraph implies, there’s no reason for major donors to support the society if they judge an alternative vendor to be more effective in delivering conferences, etc. As a result, the society would either have to adapt its programs to meet the scoring metrics of the big donors (in which case the democratic nature of the organization isn’t doing much work; the money is still calling the shots) or it would lack funding to perform those functions (in which case the organization isn’t effective on those functions).
As my third paragraph suggested, there are functions the membership society could potentially run on member revenue and small donations. But that is a significant tradeoff.
Yeah, I’ve not spent loads of time trying to think through the details. I’m reluctant to do so unless there’s interest from ‘central EA’ on this.
As ubuntu’s comments elsewhere made clear, it’s quite hard for someone to replicate various existing community structures, e.g. the conferences, even though no one has a literal monopoly on them, because they are still natural monopolies. If you’re thinking “I can’t imagine a funder supporting a new version of X if X already exists”, then that’s a good sign it is a central structure (and maybe should have democratic elements). There are lots of philosophy conferences, but that doesn’t take away from the value of having a central one.
Also, you make the point “well, but would reformed-EA be worth doing if the main funder wouldn’t support it?”. Let’s leave that as an open question. But I do want to highlight a tension between that thought and the claim that “EA is not that centralised”. If how EA operates depends (very) substantially on one what a single funder thinks, we should presumably conclude EA is very centralised. Of course, it’s then a further question of whether or not that’s good and what, if anything, should be done by various individuals about it.
Yes, I think the proposal effectively highlights that EA is significantly more centralized than some claim.
My guess is that you would have to add a claim like “Funders should not fund ‘central convening and coordinating’ functions except as consistent with the community’s will” to get anywhere with your proposal as currently sketched. That’s a negative norm, less demanding than an affirmative claim to funding. But I haven’t exhaustively explored the possibilities either.
My own view is that a member-led organization is probably viable and a good idea, but has to be realistic about what functions it could assume.
Well, you’re not going to fund stuff if you don’t like what the organisation is planning to do. That’s generally true.
I don’t mind the idea of donors funding a members’ society. This happens all the time, right? It’s just the leaders have to justify it to the members. It’s also not obvious that, if CEA were a democratic society, it would counterfactually lose funding. You might gain some and lose others. I’m not sure I would personally fund ‘reformed-CEA’ but I would be more willing to do so.
I’m confused about the mathematics of a a fee-paying membership society. I’m having a hard time seeing how that would generate more than a modest fraction of current revenues.
It’s not clear what the “central convening and coordinating parts” are. Neither Current-CEA nor Reformed-CEA would have a monopoly on tasks like funding community builders, funding/running conferences, and so on. They are just another vendor who the donors can choose to hire for those purposes. There is and would be no democratic mandate that donors who would like to fund X, Y, and Z are obliged to go through CEA.
I think your model is correct insofar as the membership society could assert independent control of certain epistemically critical functions that are relatively less reliant on funding (e.g., the Forum).
The extent to which “convening and coordinating” is effective may depend on whether there is money behind those efforts. Stated more directly, to what extent are CEA’s efforts in these areas boosted by the well-known (general yet strong) alignment between CEA and the major funder in the ecosystem? Would Reformed-CEA enjoy the same boost?
I used to work at EA Norway, which is a fee-paying membership society, and thought it might be useful to share more on how our funding worked. This is just meant as an example, and not as an argument for or against membership societies. (Here’s a longer comment explaining how we organise things at EA Norway.)
I can’t speak to EA Norway’s current situation, as I no longer have any position at EA Norway (other than being a paying member). However, I can say what it was like in 2018-2021 when I was Executive Director (ED). The total income from the membership fee roughly covered the cost of the general assembly. Most of our funding came from a community building grant from the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). However, the board made sure to fundraise enough from private donors for my salary. The two main reasons for this was to I) diversify our funding, and II) enable us to make longer term plans than CEAs grant periods.
When the board gave approval to accept the community building grant from CEA, we discussed that if at any point we did not want to follow CEAs guidelines and success metrics, we would pay back the remainder of the grant. This was definitely easier for us to say and truly mean when we had covered the ED’s salary from other sources, as it meant that if we were to return the funding, we would still have at least one employee. We never ended up disagreeing so much with CEA that we wanted to return the funds, though we were definitely very vocal about any disagreements we had with the groups team at CEA and did push for some changes.
I’m confused why you think this is required, I don’t think Michael implied it would.
The society wouldn’t be a good replacement for CEA unless it could attract significant major donor support. As the next paragraph implies, there’s no reason for major donors to support the society if they judge an alternative vendor to be more effective in delivering conferences, etc. As a result, the society would either have to adapt its programs to meet the scoring metrics of the big donors (in which case the democratic nature of the organization isn’t doing much work; the money is still calling the shots) or it would lack funding to perform those functions (in which case the organization isn’t effective on those functions).
As my third paragraph suggested, there are functions the membership society could potentially run on member revenue and small donations. But that is a significant tradeoff.
Yeah, I’ve not spent loads of time trying to think through the details. I’m reluctant to do so unless there’s interest from ‘central EA’ on this.
As ubuntu’s comments elsewhere made clear, it’s quite hard for someone to replicate various existing community structures, e.g. the conferences, even though no one has a literal monopoly on them, because they are still natural monopolies. If you’re thinking “I can’t imagine a funder supporting a new version of X if X already exists”, then that’s a good sign it is a central structure (and maybe should have democratic elements). There are lots of philosophy conferences, but that doesn’t take away from the value of having a central one.
Also, you make the point “well, but would reformed-EA be worth doing if the main funder wouldn’t support it?”. Let’s leave that as an open question. But I do want to highlight a tension between that thought and the claim that “EA is not that centralised”. If how EA operates depends (very) substantially on one what a single funder thinks, we should presumably conclude EA is very centralised. Of course, it’s then a further question of whether or not that’s good and what, if anything, should be done by various individuals about it.
Yes, I think the proposal effectively highlights that EA is significantly more centralized than some claim.
My guess is that you would have to add a claim like “Funders should not fund ‘central convening and coordinating’ functions except as consistent with the community’s will” to get anywhere with your proposal as currently sketched. That’s a negative norm, less demanding than an affirmative claim to funding. But I haven’t exhaustively explored the possibilities either.
My own view is that a member-led organization is probably viable and a good idea, but has to be realistic about what functions it could assume.
Well, you’re not going to fund stuff if you don’t like what the organisation is planning to do. That’s generally true.
I don’t mind the idea of donors funding a members’ society. This happens all the time, right? It’s just the leaders have to justify it to the members. It’s also not obvious that, if CEA were a democratic society, it would counterfactually lose funding. You might gain some and lose others. I’m not sure I would personally fund ‘reformed-CEA’ but I would be more willing to do so.