Interesting to hear these new plans. I have some questions:
Are there any concerns that targeting a small group of people, and actively employing those people under CEA, you are essentially locking CEA into path whereby it is unrepresentative of a wider global movement?
I am already concerned about how representative CEA is of a wider movement, in particular I have concerns that much of CEA’s hiring consists of using direct and personal networks within universities close to your headquarters. At the same time, I believe EA could rapidly grow in the world and be an effective force for change. If EA sees significant growth, I could forsee that the “baking in” of current founder effects to CEA (i.e. small group of “elite”) could be pretty disastrously sub-optimal (in the context of a larger global movement).
On a similar note:
Do you plan on head hunting for these roles?
Off the top of my head there’s a few incredibly successful university groups that have successfully flourished under their own volition (e.g. NTNU, PISE). There’s likely people in these groups who would be exceptionally good at community growth if given the resources you’ve described above, but I suspect that they may not think to apply for these roles.
Do you plan on comparing the success of the project, against similar organisations?
There are many organisations that aim to facilitate and build communities on University campuses. There are even EA adjacent organisations, i.e. GFI. It makes sense to me to measure the success of your project against these (especially GFI), as they essentially provide a free counterfactual regarding a change of tactics.
I ask this because I strongly suspect GFI will show stronger community building growth metrics than CEA. They provide comprehensive and beautifully designed resources for students. They public and personable (i.e. they have dedicated speakers who speak for any audience size (at least that’s what it appears to me)). And they seem to have a broader global perspective (so perhaps I am a bit bias). But in general they seem to have “the full package” which CEA is currently missing.
Is this indicative of your wider plans?/ Is CEA planning on keeping a narrow focus re: universities?
I understood that CEA community building plans were temporarily narrow, due to executive and staffing bottlenecks, but this post appears to point in the direction of CEA continuing to move in this narrow direction. Basically, I see two options 1) A tiered approach whereby “Focus” universities get the majority of attention 2) “Focus” universities get all of CEA’s attention at the exclusion of all of universities.
Can you expand on how much money you plan on spending on each campus?
I noticed you say “managing a multi-million dollar budget within three years of starting” can you explain what exactly this money is going to be spent on? Currently this appears to me (perhaps naively) to be an order of magnitude larger than the budget for the largest national organisations. How confident are you that you will follow through on this? And how confident are you that spending millions of dollars on one campus is more efficient than community building across 10 countries?
Are there any concerns that targeting a small group of people, and actively employing those people under CEA, you are essentially locking CEA into path whereby it is unrepresentative of a wider global movement?
I am already concerned about how representative CEA is of a wider movement, in particular I have concerns that much of CEA’s hiring consists of using direct and personal networks within universities close to your headquarters. At the same time, I believe EA could rapidly grow in the world and be an effective force for change. If EA sees significant growth, I could forsee that the “baking in” of current founder effects to CEA (i.e. small group of “elite”) could be pretty disastrously sub-optimal (in the context of a larger global movement).
This sounds good because no one likes nepotism or groupthink.
But at the object level, if you are saying that good candidates are turned away because they don’t literally have degrees from or close connections to Oxford or Cambridge, that doesn’t literally seem to be true, yet you’ve been pretty specific about this.
I don’t think this is what you intend. I think I can guess what you’re saying. I think the below is a response to this:
I don’t know of any founders or executives that don’t take advantage of networks when hiring people, and this is especially so for leadership roles.
From the outside view, candidates from HYPS schools or who have markers for high status have large advantages in being hired in every industry and job.
From the inside view, while these people often have high ability, they also share common culture and communication norms and other traits that enable trust. I think these are just as important as “ability” in leadership or foundational roles.
I can think of many situations where founders or movements would prefer having aligned, internally homogenous cultures among leadership. I guess that virtually all successful movements or organizations have this feature.
But the above isn’t the heart of the matter. Typically, people who argue along these lines believe there is structural, systematic selection or steering of the movement away from some broader vision into narrow focuses. Usually, insularity (HYPS or elite focus is one color of this) plays a role, and there are variations of motivated reasoning, rent-seeking, etc involved too in these criticisms.
I am skeptical of these criticisms, because when examined, they lack models of the theories of change of EA, resources EA is trying to obtain, and the considerations that go into this.
Is this indicative of your wider plans?/ Is CEA planning on keeping a narrow focus re: universities?
I’m on the Campus Specialist Manager team at CEA, which is a sub-team of the CEA Groups team, so this post does give a good overview of my plans, but it’s not necessarily indicative of CEA’s wider plans.
As well as the Campus Specialist programme, the Groups team runs a Broad University Group programme staffed by Jessica McCurdy with support from Jesse Rothman. This team provides support for all university groups regardless of ranking through general group funding and the EA Groups Resource Centre. The team is also launching UGAP (University Groups Accelerator Program) where they will be offering extra support to ~20 universities this semester. They plan to continue scaling the programme each semester.
Outside of university groups, Rob Gledhill joined the Groups team last year to work specifically on the city and national Community Building Grants programme, which was funding 10 total full-time equivalent staff (FTE) as of September (I think the number now is slightly higher).
Additionally, both university groups and city/national groups can apply to the EA Infrastructure Fund.
The Operations team, which enables the whole of CEA (and other organisations under the legal entity) to run smoothly
The Community Health team, which aims to reduce risks that could cause the EA community to lose out on a lot of value, and to preserve the community’s ability to grow and produce value in the future
Basically, I see two options 1) A tiered approach whereby “Focus” universities get the majority of attention 2) “Focus” universities get all of CEA’s attention at the exclusion of all of universities.
Across the Groups team, Focus universities currently get around half of the team’s attention, and less than half of funding from grants. We’re planning to scale up most areas of the Groups team, so it’s hard to say exactly how the balance will change. Our guiding star is figuring out how to create the most “highly-engaged EAs” per FTE of staff capacity. However, we don’t anticipate Focus universities getting all of the Groups team’s attention at the exclusion of all other universities, and it’s not the status quo trajectory.
Do you plan on head hunting for these roles?
Off the top of my head there’s a few incredibly successful university groups that have successfully flourished under their own volition (e.g. NTNU, PISE). There’s likely people in these groups who would be exceptionally good at community growth if given the resources you’ve described above, but I suspect that they may not think to apply for these roles.
Some quick notes here:
We are planning to do active outreach for these roles.
I agree that someone who has independently done excellent university group organising could be a great fit for this role.
CEA supports EA NTNU via a Community Building Grant (CBG) to EA Norway.
Also, quite a few group organisers have reached out to me since posting this, which makes me think people in this category might be quite likely to apply anyway.
But I think it’s still worth encouraging people to apply, and clarifying that you don’t need to have attended a focus university to be a Campus Specialist
Do you plan on comparing the success of the project, against similar organisations?
There are many organisations that aim to facilitate and build communities on University campuses. There are even EA adjacent organisations, i.e. GFI. It makes sense to me to measure the success of your project against these (especially GFI), as they essentially provide a free counterfactual regarding a change of tactics.
I ask this because I strongly suspect GFI will show stronger community building growth metrics than CEA. They provide comprehensive and beautifully designed resources for students. They public and personable (i.e. they have dedicated speakers who speak for any audience size (at least that’s what it appears to me)). And they seem to have a broader global perspective (so perhaps I am a bit bias). But in general they seem to have “the full package” which CEA is currently missing.
I agree having clear benchmarks to compare our work to is important. I’m not familiar with GFI’s community building activities. It seems fairly likely to me that the Campus Specialist team at CEA has moderately different goals to GFI, such that our community growth metrics might be hard to compare directly.
To track the impact of our programmes, the Campus Specialist team looks at how many people at our Focus universities are becoming “highly-engaged EAs”—individuals that have a good understanding of EA principles, show high quality reasoning, and are taking significant actions, like career plans, based on these principles. As mentioned in the post, our current benchmark is that Campus Specialists can help at least eight people per year to become highly engaged.
One interesting component to point out is that while I think our end goal is clear—creating highly-engaged EAs—we believe we’re still pretty strongly in the ‘exploration mode’ of finding the most effective tactics to achieve this. As a result, we want to spend less of our time in the Campus Specialist Programme standardising resources, and more time encouraging innovation and comparing these innovations against the core model.
By contrast, our University Group Accelerator Programme is a bit more like GFI’s programme as it has more structured tactics and resources for group leaders to implement. Jessica, who is running the programme, has been in touch with GFI to exchange lessons learned and additional resources.
Can you expand on how much money you plan on spending on each campus?
I noticed you say “managing a multi-million dollar budget within three years of starting” can you explain what exactly this money is going to be spent on? Currently this appears to me (perhaps naively) to be an order of magnitude larger than the budget for the largest national organisations. How confident are you that you will follow through on this? And how confident are you that spending millions of dollars on one campus is more efficient than community building across 10 countries?
How confident are you that you will follow through on this?
This depends on what Campus Specialists do. It’s an entrepreneurial role and we’re looking for people to initiate ambitious projects. CEA would enthusiastically support a Campus Specialist in this scaling if it seemed like a good use of resources.
I’m pretty confident that if a Campus Specialist had a good use of $3mil/year in 2025 CEA would fund it.
Will a Campus Specialist have a good use of $3mil/year in 2025? Probably. One group is looking to spend about $1m/year already (with programmes that benefit both their campus and the global community, via online options).
Can you explain what exactly this money is going to be spent on?
I can’t tell you exactly what this money will be spent on, as this depends on what projects Campus Specialists identify as high priority. Some possible examples:
Prestigious fellowships or scholarships
Lots of large, high-quality retreats e.g. using an external events company to save organiser time
Renting a space for students to co-work
Running a mini-conference every week (one group has done this already—they have coworking, seminar programmes, a talk, and a social every week of term, and it seems to have been very good for engagement, with attendance regularly around 70 people). I could imagine this being even bigger if there were even more concurrent ‘tracks’
Seed funding for students to start projects
Salaries for a team of ten
Travel expenses for speakers
Bootcamps for in-demand skills
Running an EAGx at the university
Research fellowships over the summer for students (like SERI or CERI, though they need not be in the -ERI format)
The ultimate goal across all of these programs is to find effective ways to create “highly-engaged EAs.”
And how confident are you that spending millions of dollars on one campus is more efficient than community building across 10 countries?
I’m not sure this is the right hypothetical to be comparing—CEA is supporting community building across 10 countries*. We are also looking to support 200+ universities. I think both of those things are great.
I think the relevant comparison is something like ‘how confident are you that spending millions of dollars on one campus is more efficient than the EA community’s last (interest-weighted) dollar?’
My answer depends exactly on what the millions of dollars would be spent on, but I feel pretty confident that some Campus Specialists will find ways of spending millions of dollars on one campus per year which are more efficient (in expectation) than the EA community’s last (interest-weighted) dollar.
*I listed out the first ten countries that came to mind where I know CEA supports groups: USA, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, UK, Malaysia, Hong Kong (via partnership), Netherlands, Israel, Czech Republic. (This is not an exhaustive list.)
“Running a mini-conference every week (one group has done this already—they have coworking, seminar programmes, a talk, and a social every week of term, and it seems to have been very good for engagement, with attendance regularly around 70 people). I could imagine this being even bigger if there were even more concurrent ‘tracks’”
Interesting! I actually think the most interesting question was the one that was skipped:
Are there any concerns that targeting a small group of people, and actively employing those people under CEA, you are essentially locking CEA into [a] path whereby it is unrepresentative of a wider global movement?
Regarding general strategy, which I may understand you don’t want to answer (but I hope someone will) - there really has to be some thought put into whether you are sending an inviting message to national group organisers. At the time we applied for national funding, both EA-infrastructure funds and CBG grants claimed not to be available to us (EA-funds website contained out of date advice). Luckily, we applied anyway and were successful (with EA-Infrastructure funds) - although I am not sure how “close” the decision was on EA-infrastructure funds side. At the time I predicted our chance of success as being <50%, and we could have very easily not applied for that reason.
A few months later I can see how national groups, including our-own, are a vital piece of infrastructure for not only community building, but also donation collecting and the distribution of salaries. It’s very interesting to me that CEA has no plans to accelerate this.
Re hiring: Most of our hiring is done via open rounds on our website. Very roughly (quickly tabulating this so it could be a bit off), I think that of about 18 new full time hires in the last year, about 14 applied through an open round. We obviously do extra outreach to encourage promising people we know to apply, and we sometimes shape roles around exceptional candidates.
Interesting to hear these new plans. I have some questions:
Are there any concerns that targeting a small group of people, and actively employing those people under CEA, you are essentially locking CEA into path whereby it is unrepresentative of a wider global movement?
I am already concerned about how representative CEA is of a wider movement, in particular I have concerns that much of CEA’s hiring consists of using direct and personal networks within universities close to your headquarters. At the same time, I believe EA could rapidly grow in the world and be an effective force for change. If EA sees significant growth, I could forsee that the “baking in” of current founder effects to CEA (i.e. small group of “elite”) could be pretty disastrously sub-optimal (in the context of a larger global movement).
On a similar note:
Do you plan on head hunting for these roles?
Off the top of my head there’s a few incredibly successful university groups that have successfully flourished under their own volition (e.g. NTNU, PISE). There’s likely people in these groups who would be exceptionally good at community growth if given the resources you’ve described above, but I suspect that they may not think to apply for these roles.
Do you plan on comparing the success of the project, against similar organisations?
There are many organisations that aim to facilitate and build communities on University campuses. There are even EA adjacent organisations, i.e. GFI. It makes sense to me to measure the success of your project against these (especially GFI), as they essentially provide a free counterfactual regarding a change of tactics.
I ask this because I strongly suspect GFI will show stronger community building growth metrics than CEA. They provide comprehensive and beautifully designed resources for students. They public and personable (i.e. they have dedicated speakers who speak for any audience size (at least that’s what it appears to me)). And they seem to have a broader global perspective (so perhaps I am a bit bias). But in general they seem to have “the full package” which CEA is currently missing.
Is this indicative of your wider plans?/ Is CEA planning on keeping a narrow focus re: universities?
I understood that CEA community building plans were temporarily narrow, due to executive and staffing bottlenecks, but this post appears to point in the direction of CEA continuing to move in this narrow direction. Basically, I see two options 1) A tiered approach whereby “Focus” universities get the majority of attention 2) “Focus” universities get all of CEA’s attention at the exclusion of all of universities.
Can you expand on how much money you plan on spending on each campus?
I noticed you say “managing a multi-million dollar budget within three years of starting” can you explain what exactly this money is going to be spent on? Currently this appears to me (perhaps naively) to be an order of magnitude larger than the budget for the largest national organisations. How confident are you that you will follow through on this? And how confident are you that spending millions of dollars on one campus is more efficient than community building across 10 countries?
This sounds good because no one likes nepotism or groupthink.
But at the object level, if you are saying that good candidates are turned away because they don’t literally have degrees from or close connections to Oxford or Cambridge, that doesn’t literally seem to be true, yet you’ve been pretty specific about this.
I don’t think this is what you intend. I think I can guess what you’re saying. I think the below is a response to this:
I don’t know of any founders or executives that don’t take advantage of networks when hiring people, and this is especially so for leadership roles.
From the outside view, candidates from HYPS schools or who have markers for high status have large advantages in being hired in every industry and job.
From the inside view, while these people often have high ability, they also share common culture and communication norms and other traits that enable trust. I think these are just as important as “ability” in leadership or foundational roles.
I can think of many situations where founders or movements would prefer having aligned, internally homogenous cultures among leadership. I guess that virtually all successful movements or organizations have this feature.
But the above isn’t the heart of the matter. Typically, people who argue along these lines believe there is structural, systematic selection or steering of the movement away from some broader vision into narrow focuses. Usually, insularity (HYPS or elite focus is one color of this) plays a role, and there are variations of motivated reasoning, rent-seeking, etc involved too in these criticisms.
I am skeptical of these criticisms, because when examined, they lack models of the theories of change of EA, resources EA is trying to obtain, and the considerations that go into this.
Hi Elliot, thanks for your questions.
I’m on the Campus Specialist Manager team at CEA, which is a sub-team of the CEA Groups team, so this post does give a good overview of my plans, but it’s not necessarily indicative of CEA’s wider plans.
As well as the Campus Specialist programme, the Groups team runs a Broad University Group programme staffed by Jessica McCurdy with support from Jesse Rothman. This team provides support for all university groups regardless of ranking through general group funding and the EA Groups Resource Centre. The team is also launching UGAP (University Groups Accelerator Program) where they will be offering extra support to ~20 universities this semester. They plan to continue scaling the programme each semester.
Outside of university groups, Rob Gledhill joined the Groups team last year to work specifically on the city and national Community Building Grants programme, which was funding 10 total full-time equivalent staff (FTE) as of September (I think the number now is slightly higher).
Additionally, both university groups and city/national groups can apply to the EA Infrastructure Fund.
Besides the Groups team, CEA also has:
The Events team, which runs EAG(x)
The Online team, which runs this forum, EA.org, and EA virtual programmes
The Operations team, which enables the whole of CEA (and other organisations under the legal entity) to run smoothly
The Community Health team, which aims to reduce risks that could cause the EA community to lose out on a lot of value, and to preserve the community’s ability to grow and produce value in the future
Across the Groups team, Focus universities currently get around half of the team’s attention, and less than half of funding from grants. We’re planning to scale up most areas of the Groups team, so it’s hard to say exactly how the balance will change. Our guiding star is figuring out how to create the most “highly-engaged EAs” per FTE of staff capacity. However, we don’t anticipate Focus universities getting all of the Groups team’s attention at the exclusion of all other universities, and it’s not the status quo trajectory.
Some quick notes here:
We are planning to do active outreach for these roles.
I agree that someone who has independently done excellent university group organising could be a great fit for this role.
CEA supports EA NTNU via a Community Building Grant (CBG) to EA Norway.
Also, quite a few group organisers have reached out to me since posting this, which makes me think people in this category might be quite likely to apply anyway.
But I think it’s still worth encouraging people to apply, and clarifying that you don’t need to have attended a focus university to be a Campus Specialist
I agree having clear benchmarks to compare our work to is important. I’m not familiar with GFI’s community building activities. It seems fairly likely to me that the Campus Specialist team at CEA has moderately different goals to GFI, such that our community growth metrics might be hard to compare directly.
To track the impact of our programmes, the Campus Specialist team looks at how many people at our Focus universities are becoming “highly-engaged EAs”—individuals that have a good understanding of EA principles, show high quality reasoning, and are taking significant actions, like career plans, based on these principles. As mentioned in the post, our current benchmark is that Campus Specialists can help at least eight people per year to become highly engaged.
One interesting component to point out is that while I think our end goal is clear—creating highly-engaged EAs—we believe we’re still pretty strongly in the ‘exploration mode’ of finding the most effective tactics to achieve this. As a result, we want to spend less of our time in the Campus Specialist Programme standardising resources, and more time encouraging innovation and comparing these innovations against the core model.
By contrast, our University Group Accelerator Programme is a bit more like GFI’s programme as it has more structured tactics and resources for group leaders to implement. Jessica, who is running the programme, has been in touch with GFI to exchange lessons learned and additional resources.
How confident are you that you will follow through on this?
This depends on what Campus Specialists do. It’s an entrepreneurial role and we’re looking for people to initiate ambitious projects. CEA would enthusiastically support a Campus Specialist in this scaling if it seemed like a good use of resources.
I’m pretty confident that if a Campus Specialist had a good use of $3mil/year in 2025 CEA would fund it.
Will a Campus Specialist have a good use of $3mil/year in 2025? Probably. One group is looking to spend about $1m/year already (with programmes that benefit both their campus and the global community, via online options).
Can you explain what exactly this money is going to be spent on?
I can’t tell you exactly what this money will be spent on, as this depends on what projects Campus Specialists identify as high priority. Some possible examples:
Prestigious fellowships or scholarships
Lots of large, high-quality retreats e.g. using an external events company to save organiser time
Renting a space for students to co-work
Running a mini-conference every week (one group has done this already—they have coworking, seminar programmes, a talk, and a social every week of term, and it seems to have been very good for engagement, with attendance regularly around 70 people). I could imagine this being even bigger if there were even more concurrent ‘tracks’
Seed funding for students to start projects
Salaries for a team of ten
Travel expenses for speakers
Bootcamps for in-demand skills
Running an EAGx at the university
Research fellowships over the summer for students (like SERI or CERI, though they need not be in the -ERI format)
The ultimate goal across all of these programs is to find effective ways to create “highly-engaged EAs.”
And how confident are you that spending millions of dollars on one campus is more efficient than community building across 10 countries?
I’m not sure this is the right hypothetical to be comparing—CEA is supporting community building across 10 countries*. We are also looking to support 200+ universities. I think both of those things are great.
I think the relevant comparison is something like ‘how confident are you that spending millions of dollars on one campus is more efficient than the EA community’s last (interest-weighted) dollar?’
My answer depends exactly on what the millions of dollars would be spent on, but I feel pretty confident that some Campus Specialists will find ways of spending millions of dollars on one campus per year which are more efficient (in expectation) than the EA community’s last (interest-weighted) dollar.
*I listed out the first ten countries that came to mind where I know CEA supports groups: USA, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, UK, Malaysia, Hong Kong (via partnership), Netherlands, Israel, Czech Republic. (This is not an exhaustive list.)
“Running a mini-conference every week (one group has done this already—they have coworking, seminar programmes, a talk, and a social every week of term, and it seems to have been very good for engagement, with attendance regularly around 70 people). I could imagine this being even bigger if there were even more concurrent ‘tracks’”
Which group was this?
Interesting! I actually think the most interesting question was the one that was skipped:
Regarding general strategy, which I may understand you don’t want to answer (but I hope someone will) - there really has to be some thought put into whether you are sending an inviting message to national group organisers. At the time we applied for national funding, both EA-infrastructure funds and CBG grants claimed not to be available to us (EA-funds website contained out of date advice). Luckily, we applied anyway and were successful (with EA-Infrastructure funds) - although I am not sure how “close” the decision was on EA-infrastructure funds side. At the time I predicted our chance of success as being <50%, and we could have very easily not applied for that reason.
A few months later I can see how national groups, including our-own, are a vital piece of infrastructure for not only community building, but also donation collecting and the distribution of salaries. It’s very interesting to me that CEA has no plans to accelerate this.
Re hiring: Most of our hiring is done via open rounds on our website. Very roughly (quickly tabulating this so it could be a bit off), I think that of about 18 new full time hires in the last year, about 14 applied through an open round. We obviously do extra outreach to encourage promising people we know to apply, and we sometimes shape roles around exceptional candidates.
My reply above might address some of your points. We’ll give a more detailed reply in the next week or so.