I think this idea makes sense and more coordination is good, especially for CB efforts. I think e.g. more formal coordination in the US (e.g. East Coast universities) would bring a lot of the benefits you outlined. Outside of the US I think Manuel’s national org providing support model will likely make more sense, because national orgs are already fairly stable and for the other reasons he mentioned.
I think the main reason this won’t happen in practice (although I’d love to be wrong!) is:
Resources / Funding
This doesn’t appear to be a priority for CEA’s CB program. Their model is to have local groups, and then provide mentorship / support directly to their target groups or peer-to-peer via CB grantee-only channels or retreats
I’d (weakly) expect EAIF may have a high bar for funding this since it’s a (somewhat) new model . I’d guess they would have a high bar for funding (e.g. the use case being really strong—e.g. supporting a region with a lot of groups or a team with a fairly strong track record). However, this coud be totally wrong and it would definitely be worth applying for funding and seeing what would happen.
Talent
RE: “Firstly, I think finding people is not that hard.”
+1 to “it’s hard to get people” :
I think CB as a career path is not a very stable / predictable path right now (although that will hopefully improve with time)
I think it’s difficult to find people who are interested in coordination alone vs other CB activities
Also : “and anyone can step up at any time to take up some of the responsibilities.”
From my experience this is not the case. Doing handovers, especially for new/small projects is not that simple.
Especially if the work is unpaid, but even if paid.
RE: “I think it’s totally possible to run a regional group without any main coordinator.”
I disagree .
I think you may be a little too optimistic about people’s interest in / willingness to do coordination work (although I wish we were all operations nerds, that simply isn’t the case).
It could be fairly inefficient to have a lot of people split time over this, from a logistical perspective (e.g. it’s easy to waste a lot of time coordinating coordination activities, if that makes sense). I think a better model would be to have a few dedicated people who can do the coordination really well. Perhaps 1-2 people spending >50% of their time on this.
I think it’s plausible that people might end up wasting time if the region is not sufficiently large enough to support more formal activities, and would rather see individuals experimenting with smaller things (e.g. see my 80⁄20 comment)
For all the above reasons, I’d expect funders to be more hesitant to see several organizers splitting time over 1 regional group
If you lack proper funding or a formal accountability structure you risk the regional group dying out or being less active
Meta-level side-comment: I like that you have diagrams & the overall structure of the post. I would say most of my points below come from pragmatic issues that may not be easy to know when you’re just starting (I think if I’d written a post about infrastructure 2-3 years back I would have probably had many of the same assumptions / optimism. I have since changed my mind on many of those things)
I think this idea makes sense and more coordination is good, especially for CB efforts. I think e.g. more formal coordination in the US (e.g. East Coast universities) would bring a lot of the benefits you outlined. Outside of the US I think Manuel’s national org providing support model will likely make more sense, because national orgs are already fairly stable and for the other reasons he mentioned.
I think the main reason this won’t happen in practice (although I’d love to be wrong!) is:
Resources / Funding
This doesn’t appear to be a priority for CEA’s CB program. Their model is to have local groups, and then provide mentorship / support directly to their target groups or peer-to-peer via CB grantee-only channels or retreats
I’d (weakly) expect EAIF may have a high bar for funding this since it’s a (somewhat) new model . I’d guess they would have a high bar for funding (e.g. the use case being really strong—e.g. supporting a region with a lot of groups or a team with a fairly strong track record). However, this coud be totally wrong and it would definitely be worth applying for funding and seeing what would happen.
Talent
RE: “Firstly, I think finding people is not that hard.”
+1 to “it’s hard to get people” :
I think CB as a career path is not a very stable / predictable path right now (although that will hopefully improve with time)
I think it’s difficult to find people who are interested in coordination alone vs other CB activities
Also : “and anyone can step up at any time to take up some of the responsibilities.”
From my experience this is not the case. Doing handovers, especially for new/small projects is not that simple.
Especially if the work is unpaid, but even if paid.
RE: “I think it’s totally possible to run a regional group without any main coordinator.”
I disagree .
I think you may be a little too optimistic about people’s interest in / willingness to do coordination work (although I wish we were all operations nerds, that simply isn’t the case).
It could be fairly inefficient to have a lot of people split time over this, from a logistical perspective (e.g. it’s easy to waste a lot of time coordinating coordination activities, if that makes sense). I think a better model would be to have a few dedicated people who can do the coordination really well. Perhaps 1-2 people spending >50% of their time on this.
I think it’s plausible that people might end up wasting time if the region is not sufficiently large enough to support more formal activities, and would rather see individuals experimenting with smaller things (e.g. see my 80⁄20 comment)
For all the above reasons, I’d expect funders to be more hesitant to see several organizers splitting time over 1 regional group
If you lack proper funding or a formal accountability structure you risk the regional group dying out or being less active
Meta-level side-comment: I like that you have diagrams & the overall structure of the post. I would say most of my points below come from pragmatic issues that may not be easy to know when you’re just starting (I think if I’d written a post about infrastructure 2-3 years back I would have probably had many of the same assumptions / optimism. I have since changed my mind on many of those things)