Thanks for this.However, I’m still a bit confused.
You seem to be saying that devoting resources to smaller groups is useful for:
a) Making the community welcoming b) Building a diverse community c) Strengthening the commitment of existing EAs
But, presumably, all of these goals are better accomplished by spending resources on the groups with the most people since all of these benefits depend on the number of people in the groups.
It could be that you think preventing groups from dying out is important for improving diversity in the community, but this could only be true if some demographics are systematically more likely to trying to start an EA group and fail. Otherwise, we would expect the demographics of chapter leaders to roughly match the demographics of EA as a whole.
The reason I’m asking all of this is to try to compare models of why groups succeed and why groups fail. Presumably, our goal is to create vibrant, self-sustaining communities like those in SF, London, Boston and elsewhere. I have a lot less on-the-ground experience than you do, but I think there are roughly four phases that a group needs to go through to be effective and sustainable.
1) The group is founded by (or quickly attracts) a highly dedicated, energetic, and skilled founder.
2) The founder is able to attract a small group of highly dedicated chapter members to help found the group.
3) The group establishes tactics for regularly attracting new chapter members.
4) The founder sets up a system for passing leadership of the group onto a highly dedicated chapter member.
I think the skill of the founder matters a great deal because getting people to join a chapter is much harder early on than it is later. This is because chapters are more valuable the more people are in them. We should expect that recruiting the second person is going to be much harder than recruiting the 20th person.
My rough hypothesis is that we probably lack the ability to substantially improve the skills and abilities of founders and so the supply of excellent founders is probably the bottleneck on establishing sustainable groups.
If this is true, then it makes sense to spend time identifying and cultivating highly-dedicated founders, but it probably doesn’t make sense to spend much time trying to save groups from disappearing. I’m interested in whether your agree with this model and if not, where you think we disagree.
Thanks for this.However, I’m still a bit confused.
You seem to be saying that devoting resources to smaller groups is useful for:
But, presumably, all of these goals are better accomplished by spending resources on the groups with the most people since all of these benefits depend on the number of people in the groups.
It could be that you think preventing groups from dying out is important for improving diversity in the community, but this could only be true if some demographics are systematically more likely to trying to start an EA group and fail. Otherwise, we would expect the demographics of chapter leaders to roughly match the demographics of EA as a whole.
The reason I’m asking all of this is to try to compare models of why groups succeed and why groups fail. Presumably, our goal is to create vibrant, self-sustaining communities like those in SF, London, Boston and elsewhere. I have a lot less on-the-ground experience than you do, but I think there are roughly four phases that a group needs to go through to be effective and sustainable.
1) The group is founded by (or quickly attracts) a highly dedicated, energetic, and skilled founder. 2) The founder is able to attract a small group of highly dedicated chapter members to help found the group. 3) The group establishes tactics for regularly attracting new chapter members. 4) The founder sets up a system for passing leadership of the group onto a highly dedicated chapter member.
I think the skill of the founder matters a great deal because getting people to join a chapter is much harder early on than it is later. This is because chapters are more valuable the more people are in them. We should expect that recruiting the second person is going to be much harder than recruiting the 20th person.
My rough hypothesis is that we probably lack the ability to substantially improve the skills and abilities of founders and so the supply of excellent founders is probably the bottleneck on establishing sustainable groups.
If this is true, then it makes sense to spend time identifying and cultivating highly-dedicated founders, but it probably doesn’t make sense to spend much time trying to save groups from disappearing. I’m interested in whether your agree with this model and if not, where you think we disagree.
Thanks for this, I don’t think we disagree all that much actually—let’s chat about it in our Skype.
And for anyone else that wants to chat: calendly.com/georgiedotimpact