Thanks for clarifying, I get what you’re saying now!
TL:DR: while I’m in agreement that these things would be valuable, in the current state it wouldn’t make sense to prioritise them when there’s a lot of value to be found in increasing awareness of existing resources, even if they are imperfect and writing about resources where there currently are none for common events.
I agree that there is a severe lack of resources, we actually link to the South Bay discussion lists (unfortunately since you made the resources there isn’t anything new regarding discussions sheets). We are also slowly adding and developing them as I am running a series of guided discusisons for the Philly group.
Given where we were at with the resources up until recently, the most valuable and time efficient thing to do was to organise existing resources and then evaluate what the most pressing gaps in knowledge were. i.e. it was better to have some resources for all the basic group activities—be that running discussions, how to host events, moderating talks, venue, food and logistics, leadership structure etc. As you can see, a long list of topics! the goal was to consolidate movement-wide knowledge, and have resources well-organised and accessible.
I don’t think your group was unique with regards to needing resources, although I think other groups may do more socials and other kinds of meetups that require less preparation.
I agree that there isn’t a curriculum, and that taking lessons from education science would be very useful and valuable. I think that we can definitely work to make EA principles and ideas more accessible by a large margin. Currently, there aren’t enough people working on group building resources to do something like this, and I believe that just improving the knowledge of existing resources will provide the most value to group organisers. That being said, Catherine, who is in charge of the Resources team, does have an education background, and I think that has definitely influenced our work positively!
Thanks for clarifying, I get what you’re saying now!
TL:DR: while I’m in agreement that these things would be valuable, in the current state it wouldn’t make sense to prioritise them when there’s a lot of value to be found in increasing awareness of existing resources, even if they are imperfect and writing about resources where there currently are none for common events.
I agree that there is a severe lack of resources, we actually link to the South Bay discussion lists (unfortunately since you made the resources there isn’t anything new regarding discussions sheets). We are also slowly adding and developing them as I am running a series of guided discusisons for the Philly group.
Given where we were at with the resources up until recently, the most valuable and time efficient thing to do was to organise existing resources and then evaluate what the most pressing gaps in knowledge were. i.e. it was better to have some resources for all the basic group activities—be that running discussions, how to host events, moderating talks, venue, food and logistics, leadership structure etc. As you can see, a long list of topics! the goal was to consolidate movement-wide knowledge, and have resources well-organised and accessible.
I don’t think your group was unique with regards to needing resources, although I think other groups may do more socials and other kinds of meetups that require less preparation.
I agree that there isn’t a curriculum, and that taking lessons from education science would be very useful and valuable. I think that we can definitely work to make EA principles and ideas more accessible by a large margin. Currently, there aren’t enough people working on group building resources to do something like this, and I believe that just improving the knowledge of existing resources will provide the most value to group organisers. That being said, Catherine, who is in charge of the Resources team, does have an education background, and I think that has definitely influenced our work positively!