I think events are underrated in EA community building.
I have heard many people argue against organising relatively simple events such as, ‘get a venue, get a speaker, invite people’. I think the early success of the Tien Procent Club in the Netherlands should make people doubt that advice.
Why? Well, the first thing to mention is that they simply get great attendance, and their attendees are not typical EAs. I think their biggest so far has been 400, and the typical attendee is a professional in their 30s or 40s. It also does an amazing job of generating buzz. For example, suppose you’ve got a journalist writing an article about your community. In that case, it’s pretty cool if you can invite them to an event with hundreds of regular people in attendance.
Now, of course, attendance doesn’t translate to impact. However, I think we can see the early signs of people actually changing their behaviour.
For example, running a quick check on GWWC’s referral dashboard, I can see four pledges that refer to the Tien Procent Club (2 trial, 2 full). Based on GWWC’s March 2023 impact evaluation, they can therefore self-attribute ~$44k of 2022-equivalent donations to high-impact funding opportunities.
This is despite the fact they started less than two years ago and don’t have any funding other than what they have provided themselves or raised through selling tickets.
What’s more, it’s beginning to look like their formula works in different contexts. They started in Amsterdam, but since then they’ve seeded new organising teams elsewhere in the Netherlands, and the teams in Rotterdam and Utrecht have successfully organised their first events.
One caveat to all of this is that they received quite a bit of promotion from Rutger Bregman, a very prominent writer in the Netherlands. I know people are going to experiment with the TPC format abroad. I assume they won’t have a similar ambassador. It will therefore be interesting to see if the formula still works without such a resource.
In the meantime, my current takeaways are: get an endorsement from someone like Bregman + if your target audience is non-students who aren’t already EAs, put on events that only require shallow engagement but are good fun + focus on doing what you’re good at (e.g., they only do large events, and they only do them once every 3 months).
I have heard many people argue against organising relatively simple events
I’m actually very surprised to hear this. What does the “common view” presume then?
Personally, I see 3 tiers of events: 1. Any casual, low-commitment, low stakes events 2. Big EA conferences that I find quite valuable for meeting lots of people intentionally and socially 3. Professionally-focused events (research fellowships, incubators etc)
I think “simple” events like 1 are great for socialising and meeting new people. While 2 and 3 get more done, I don’t think the community would feel as welcoming if the only events occurring were ones where you had to be fully professional.
Sometimes I still want to interact with EAs, but without the expectation of “meeting right” or “networking”. I suspect this applies especially to introverts and beginners. Even just going to a conference with the expectation of booking lots of 1-on-1s vs just chilling feels very different.
Yeah, that’s a good categorisation, although often 3 is less ‘professionally focused events’ and more ‘events for highly committed EAs’.
I think the common EA CB view is captured in the below quote (my own italics), which is taken from the CEA’s Group Resource Centre’s page ‘How do EA groups produce impact?’.
We believe a central obstacle to progress on the world’s most pressing problems is a shortage of talented people taking significant actions. Therefore, we are particularly excited about people pivoting into high-impact careers. This is not to say that we don’t think spending time on funding and sharing EA ideas is not positive, just that perhaps these things are not as neglected as providing platforms for talented people to take significant actions. Some examples could be changing career plans, founding organisations or start-ups, or assisting those already producing impact. For more examples, see Ollie Base’s EA forum post about what people who were part of the EA Warwick group are doing now.
That isn’t to say groups should only optimize for career changes (and we don’t advocate for trying to push people into specific careers); it’s one useful frame for understanding your group’s impact. This also suggests that you should focus time and effort on deeply engaging the most committed members rather than just shifting some choices of many people.
I think this is broadly right. But I think EA CBs often overcorrect in this direction and, as a result, neglect events that aim for broad reach but shallow engagement.
On CB, my views that are half informed by EA CBs and half personal opinions:
Very casual events—If you are holding no events for a long time and don’t have much capacity, just hold low-stakes casual events and follow-up with high-engaged people afterwards. Highly-engaged people tend to show up/follow up several times after learning about EA anyway. 80-90% of the time, I think having some casual events every few weeks is better than no casual events.
Bigger events—Try to direct highly-engaged people to bigger and/or more specialised events. The EA community is big and diverse, and letting people know other events exist lets them self-select better. When I first explored beyond EA Singapore, I spent 2 months straight learning about every EA org and resource in existence, individually reviewing all the Swapcard profiles at every EAG. That was absolutely worth the effort, IMO.[1]
1-on-1s are probably still important − 1-on-1s with someone of very similar interest areas or career trajectories are the most valuable experiences in EA, in my opinion. Only 10% of 1-on-1s are like this, but they more than make up for the 90% that don’t really go anywhere. As much as I try to optimise, this seems to be a numbers game of just finding and meeting a lot of potentially interesting people.[2]
Online resources—For highly-engaged EAs, important information should be online-first. I’m of the opinion that highly-engaged/agentic new EAs tend to read a lot online, and can gain >80% of the same field-specific knowledge reading on their own. This especially holds true in AI Safety, which is like … code and research that’s all publicly available short of frontier models. I think events should be for casual socials, intentional networking and accountability+complex coordination (basically, coworkers).
If you want the 80⁄20 for AI Safety, check out aisafety.training, aisafety.world, check EA Forum, Lesswrong and Alignment Forum once a week (~1 hour/week), check 80k job board and EA Opportunities Board once a week (~20 minutes/week), review forum tags for things like prizes, job opportunities and research programs to see what programs were run last year that will be run again this year.
It is possible to capture all open opportunities this way. The rest is just researching interesting orgs, seeing which ones you vibe with and engaging with them. This is just for AI Safety, for other cause areas I’d expect the same amount of time spent passively checking.
My personal view is people should slightly prioritise “potentially interesting” over “potentially useful”. The few times I’ve met EAs just because they’re high-ranking, the conversation is usually generic and could have been had by Googling and emailing/texting.
When I first started at EA Netherlands I was explicitly advised against it, and more generally it seems to be ‘in the air’. For example:
The groups resource hub says “This also suggests that you should focus time and effort on deeply engaging the most committed members rather than just shifting some choices of many people.”
Kuhan’s widely shared post on ‘lessons from running Stanford EA’ has in its summary “Focus on retention and deep engagement over shallow engagement”
CEA’s Groups Team’s post on ‘advice we give to new university organiser’ says “We think it’s good to do broad recruiting at the beginning of the semester, as with any club or activity. But beyond this big push of raising awareness, we think it’s most often better to pay more attention to people who seem very interested in—and willing to take significant action based on—EA ideas”
Writing this out has made me realise something. I think this advice makes more sense in a university context, where students are time-rich and are going through an intense social experience, but it makes less sense when you’re targeting professionals. I suspect it’s still ‘in the air’ because, historically, CEA has been very good at targeting students.
As a consequence, very few national orgs (including ourselves) organise TPC-esque events (broad reach, low engagement). For us, this is because our strategy is to focus on supporting local organisers in organising their own events (the theory is that then we can have lots of events without having to organise all of them ourselves). But I don’t think that’s the case for other national organisations (other national CBs, please jump in and correct me if I’m wrong, e.g., I know @lynn at EA UK has been organising career talks).
Ultimately, I guess what I’m saying is what I’ve said elsewhere: you need a blend of ‘mobilising’ (broad reach, low engagement) and ‘organising’ (narrow reach, high engagement), and I think EA groups often do too much organising.
I guess I don’t interpret those bullets as “arguing against organising simple events” but rather “put your effort into supporting more engaged people” and that could even be consistent with running simple events, since it means less time on broad outreach compared to e.g. a high-effort welcoming event.
I agree with the first part of your last sentence (the blend), I don’t know how EA groups spend their time.
Hmm, yeah, but by arguing for “put your effort into supporting more engaged people” you’re effectively arguing against “relatively large events that require relatively shallow engagement”. I think that’s the mistake. I think it should be an even blend of the two.
I think events are underrated in EA community building.
I have heard many people argue against organising relatively simple events such as, ‘get a venue, get a speaker, invite people’. I think the early success of the Tien Procent Club in the Netherlands should make people doubt that advice.
Why? Well, the first thing to mention is that they simply get great attendance, and their attendees are not typical EAs. I think their biggest so far has been 400, and the typical attendee is a professional in their 30s or 40s. It also does an amazing job of generating buzz. For example, suppose you’ve got a journalist writing an article about your community. In that case, it’s pretty cool if you can invite them to an event with hundreds of regular people in attendance.
Now, of course, attendance doesn’t translate to impact. However, I think we can see the early signs of people actually changing their behaviour.
For example, running a quick check on GWWC’s referral dashboard, I can see four pledges that refer to the Tien Procent Club (2 trial, 2 full). Based on GWWC’s March 2023 impact evaluation, they can therefore self-attribute ~$44k of 2022-equivalent donations to high-impact funding opportunities.
This is despite the fact they started less than two years ago and don’t have any funding other than what they have provided themselves or raised through selling tickets.
What’s more, it’s beginning to look like their formula works in different contexts. They started in Amsterdam, but since then they’ve seeded new organising teams elsewhere in the Netherlands, and the teams in Rotterdam and Utrecht have successfully organised their first events.
One caveat to all of this is that they received quite a bit of promotion from Rutger Bregman, a very prominent writer in the Netherlands. I know people are going to experiment with the TPC format abroad. I assume they won’t have a similar ambassador. It will therefore be interesting to see if the formula still works without such a resource.
In the meantime, my current takeaways are: get an endorsement from someone like Bregman + if your target audience is non-students who aren’t already EAs, put on events that only require shallow engagement but are good fun + focus on doing what you’re good at (e.g., they only do large events, and they only do them once every 3 months).
I’m actually very surprised to hear this. What does the “common view” presume then?
Personally, I see 3 tiers of events: 1. Any casual, low-commitment, low stakes events 2. Big EA conferences that I find quite valuable for meeting lots of people intentionally and socially 3. Professionally-focused events (research fellowships, incubators etc)
I think “simple” events like 1 are great for socialising and meeting new people. While 2 and 3 get more done, I don’t think the community would feel as welcoming if the only events occurring were ones where you had to be fully professional.
Sometimes I still want to interact with EAs, but without the expectation of “meeting right” or “networking”. I suspect this applies especially to introverts and beginners. Even just going to a conference with the expectation of booking lots of 1-on-1s vs just chilling feels very different.
Yeah, that’s a good categorisation, although often 3 is less ‘professionally focused events’ and more ‘events for highly committed EAs’.
I think the common EA CB view is captured in the below quote (my own italics), which is taken from the CEA’s Group Resource Centre’s page ‘How do EA groups produce impact?’.
I think this is broadly right. But I think EA CBs often overcorrect in this direction and, as a result, neglect events that aim for broad reach but shallow engagement.
On CB, my views that are half informed by EA CBs and half personal opinions:
Very casual events—If you are holding no events for a long time and don’t have much capacity, just hold low-stakes casual events and follow-up with high-engaged people afterwards. Highly-engaged people tend to show up/follow up several times after learning about EA anyway. 80-90% of the time, I think having some casual events every few weeks is better than no casual events.
Bigger events—Try to direct highly-engaged people to bigger and/or more specialised events. The EA community is big and diverse, and letting people know other events exist lets them self-select better. When I first explored beyond EA Singapore, I spent 2 months straight learning about every EA org and resource in existence, individually reviewing all the Swapcard profiles at every EAG. That was absolutely worth the effort, IMO.[1]
1-on-1s are probably still important − 1-on-1s with someone of very similar interest areas or career trajectories are the most valuable experiences in EA, in my opinion. Only 10% of 1-on-1s are like this, but they more than make up for the 90% that don’t really go anywhere. As much as I try to optimise, this seems to be a numbers game of just finding and meeting a lot of potentially interesting people.[2]
Online resources—For highly-engaged EAs, important information should be online-first. I’m of the opinion that highly-engaged/agentic new EAs tend to read a lot online, and can gain >80% of the same field-specific knowledge reading on their own. This especially holds true in AI Safety, which is like … code and research that’s all publicly available short of frontier models. I think events should be for casual socials, intentional networking and accountability+complex coordination (basically, coworkers).
If you want the 80⁄20 for AI Safety, check out aisafety.training, aisafety.world, check EA Forum, Lesswrong and Alignment Forum once a week (~1 hour/week), check 80k job board and EA Opportunities Board once a week (~20 minutes/week), review forum tags for things like prizes, job opportunities and research programs to see what programs were run last year that will be run again this year.
It is possible to capture all open opportunities this way. The rest is just researching interesting orgs, seeing which ones you vibe with and engaging with them. This is just for AI Safety, for other cause areas I’d expect the same amount of time spent passively checking.
My personal view is people should slightly prioritise “potentially interesting” over “potentially useful”. The few times I’ve met EAs just because they’re high-ranking, the conversation is usually generic and could have been had by Googling and emailing/texting.
I agree!
> I have heard many people argue against organising relatively simple events such as, ‘get a venue, get a speaker, invite people’.
Where have you heard this? I’ve not seen this.
> get an endorsement from someone like Bregman
Noting that this isn’t easy and could be a large driver of the value!
When I first started at EA Netherlands I was explicitly advised against it, and more generally it seems to be ‘in the air’. For example:
The groups resource hub says “This also suggests that you should focus time and effort on deeply engaging the most committed members rather than just shifting some choices of many people.”
Kuhan’s widely shared post on ‘lessons from running Stanford EA’ has in its summary “Focus on retention and deep engagement over shallow engagement”
CEA’s Groups Team’s post on ‘advice we give to new university organiser’ says “We think it’s good to do broad recruiting at the beginning of the semester, as with any club or activity. But beyond this big push of raising awareness, we think it’s most often better to pay more attention to people who seem very interested in—and willing to take significant action based on—EA ideas”
Writing this out has made me realise something. I think this advice makes more sense in a university context, where students are time-rich and are going through an intense social experience, but it makes less sense when you’re targeting professionals. I suspect it’s still ‘in the air’ because, historically, CEA has been very good at targeting students.
As a consequence, very few national orgs (including ourselves) organise TPC-esque events (broad reach, low engagement). For us, this is because our strategy is to focus on supporting local organisers in organising their own events (the theory is that then we can have lots of events without having to organise all of them ourselves). But I don’t think that’s the case for other national organisations (other national CBs, please jump in and correct me if I’m wrong, e.g., I know @lynn at EA UK has been organising career talks).
Ultimately, I guess what I’m saying is what I’ve said elsewhere: you need a blend of ‘mobilising’ (broad reach, low engagement) and ‘organising’ (narrow reach, high engagement), and I think EA groups often do too much organising.
Thanks, that makes sense.
I guess I don’t interpret those bullets as “arguing against organising simple events” but rather “put your effort into supporting more engaged people” and that could even be consistent with running simple events, since it means less time on broad outreach compared to e.g. a high-effort welcoming event.
I agree with the first part of your last sentence (the blend), I don’t know how EA groups spend their time.
Hmm, yeah, but by arguing for “put your effort into supporting more engaged people” you’re effectively arguing against “relatively large events that require relatively shallow engagement”. I think that’s the mistake. I think it should be an even blend of the two.