Prioritizing top universities makes perfect sense to me. I would argue we should consider directly working to establish EA communities at highly ranked universities that currently have none.
The choice of countries and cities makes much less sense to me.
My guess would be that the success of a given EA community is highly dependent on founder effects. The groups doing very well already have capable people with a keen sense on how to grow their community. If they didn’t they wouldn’t have gotten big in the first place.
Why focus most of your time on these communities? It seems to me their organizers are perfectly capable and will do just fine as long as they are provided adequate funding.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to be spending your time helping smaller communities grow? Cities that immediately spring to mind are:
They are all populous cities with highly educated populations. I don’t have any a priori reason to believe that Austin and Warsaw has much less ‘ea-potential’ than Stockholm and Prague. It seems to me that many places have potential to grow as big as the communities you’re focusing on, but for some reason have not.
Shouldn’t it be higher among CEA’s priorities to figure out how to help communities like these?
Just to echo your point about supporting university groups—beyond supporting a subset of university groups with full-time organizers via the CBG program, we just released a job posting for someone to help us develop a scalable university support program that I think is high impact. This will further support volunteer-led university groups.
> I don’t have any a priori reason to believe that Austin and Warsaw have much less ‘ea-potential’ than Stockholm and Prague. It seems to me that many places have potential to grow as big as the communities you’re focusing on, but for some reason have not.
We’d agree with that. Apart from India, our key locations were chosen because of their existing large groups of engaged EAs, not because of the particular potential of that location. As we noted in the post, about half of these groups with large EA populations currently don’t have paid community builders, so we’d like to make sure there are paid community builders in these areas before considering locations to grow EA in further. I’ll make a note to add the locations you suggested to consider as part of our analysis.
There are projects other than the CBG programme that are intended to support the community members in other locations, including the EA Forum, conferences, virtual programs, and non-salary funding for all groups. We’re pleased that the EAIF is able to assess funding applications from other groups, and we expect volunteer-run and EAIF funded groups will also be able to grow.
Prioritizing top universities makes perfect sense to me. I would argue we should consider directly working to establish EA communities at highly ranked universities that currently have none.
The choice of countries and cities makes much less sense to me.
My guess would be that the success of a given EA community is highly dependent on founder effects. The groups doing very well already have capable people with a keen sense on how to grow their community. If they didn’t they wouldn’t have gotten big in the first place.
Why focus most of your time on these communities? It seems to me their organizers are perfectly capable and will do just fine as long as they are provided adequate funding.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to be spending your time helping smaller communities grow? Cities that immediately spring to mind are:
1. Seattle
2. Austin
3. Warsaw
4. Moscow
5. Copenhagen
They are all populous cities with highly educated populations. I don’t have any a priori reason to believe that Austin and Warsaw has much less ‘ea-potential’ than Stockholm and Prague. It seems to me that many places have potential to grow as big as the communities you’re focusing on, but for some reason have not.
Shouldn’t it be higher among CEA’s priorities to figure out how to help communities like these?
Thanks for your comments Mathias,
Just to echo your point about supporting university groups—beyond supporting a subset of university groups with full-time organizers via the CBG program, we just released a job posting for someone to help us develop a scalable university support program that I think is high impact. This will further support volunteer-led university groups.
> I don’t have any a priori reason to believe that Austin and Warsaw have much less ‘ea-potential’ than Stockholm and Prague. It seems to me that many places have potential to grow as big as the communities you’re focusing on, but for some reason have not.
We’d agree with that. Apart from India, our key locations were chosen because of their existing large groups of engaged EAs, not because of the particular potential of that location. As we noted in the post, about half of these groups with large EA populations currently don’t have paid community builders, so we’d like to make sure there are paid community builders in these areas before considering locations to grow EA in further. I’ll make a note to add the locations you suggested to consider as part of our analysis.
There are projects other than the CBG programme that are intended to support the community members in other locations, including the EA Forum, conferences, virtual programs, and non-salary funding for all groups. We’re pleased that the EAIF is able to assess funding applications from other groups, and we expect volunteer-run and EAIF funded groups will also be able to grow.