EA Switzerland—Strategy (v2024)

Alix Pham22 Jul 2024 9:16 UTC
37 points
3 comments19 min readEA link

Version 1.1 - July 2024

Thanks to everyone who contributed directly or indirectly, e.g. our board, our peers from the Community Building Grants Program, our group organizers and community members.

Overview

This document offers an overview of the strategic vision for EA Switzerland. It is intended to be aspirational—a resource to guide our thinking when we consider our work on a higher level. We intend to review this document yearly. In this document, “we” is EA Switzerland’s team.

Who?

  • We start with a brief history of EA Switzerland.

  • Then, we follow with an analysis of the characteristics of Switzerland, and in particular the EA Switzerland subcommunity, that we anticipate to be comparative advantages and disadvantages.

  • We describe our values as an association and a community.

Why?

In this section, we describe our approach to Effective Altruism (EA) and community building.

  • We lay out our framework, based on the definition of EA as a question:

    • We describe two typical trajectories—Question-First and Answer-First—that people follow in their journey toward impact.

    • We then outline how the two tracks we offer—EA-Principles and Cause-Specific—provide an infrastructure to support people in their journey.

  • Given this framework, we detail our priorities, and how we plan to divide our resources

What?

There, we show what the above approach concretely means for EA Switzerland by outlining the activities that we want to be doing.

  • We present our theory of change: how we see our current activities contributing to our longterm goal—getting more people to have more positive impact.

  • We then suggest an annual calendar displaying our foreseen activities in an ideal year.

  • We introduce our resources for community members and group organizers.

How?

Finally, we offer a glimpse of our processes as a team and an association.

Who? - EA Switzerland

Our History

EA Geneva was founded on Oct 13, 2015; EA Zurich started out in 2016. EA Geneva has a shared history with the EA Foundation, but quickly became a stand-alone project. EA Switzerland is the result of the merger of two registered associations: EA Geneva and EA Zurich, and is now legally hosted by EA Geneva.

Our Comparative Advantages & Disadvantages

Financial Comfort & Wealth

Switzerland is the fifth richest country by median income and expenditure per day, and the average disposable income was 6706 CHF/​month in 2021. It is a very wealthy country, and we believe that it means our community members are on average more likely to have high standards of living, with a comfortable income and a privileged lifestyle. Hence:

  • The Swiss community—mainly professionals—can take more risks, as they have higher chances of having runaway money and potential contingency plans; especially later in their career.

    • Though this might be true theoretically, the Swiss culture values security a lot and might underestimate their potential for risk-taking and thus be more risk-averse than they could afford to be.[1]

    • We want to tap into that potential to motivate people to start projects and help them make the leap of e.g. career change.

    • High-income individuals in Switzerland come from e.g., the tech sector (e.g., Google, Meta), the bank/​finance sector.

  • Earning to give arguments can reach a large audience.

    • It has been a widely used strategy in our community, and we believe it is impactful. However, we prioritize career changes for direct work whenever possible, as we think it might be even more impactful for some people.

    • In that context, we also believe that there might be room to create a local high-impact funding ecosystem.

  • The disadvantageous flipside is higher costs of living for Swiss EAs and higher costs for EA-aligned projects in Switzerland. It means it is harder for Swiss EAs to work remotely for organizations because they require a higher salary and it is more expensive to execute projects.[2]

Multicultural Community & International Hub

Switzerland has 4 official languages, and the population is highly multicultural. In 2015, almost 30% of the Swiss population was born in another country. We think that this diversity might remove some cultural obstacles or taboos—because beliefs are not held by a significant part of the Swiss society.

Additionally, Switzerland is globally recognized as a diplomatic hub, a neutral ground, and hosts a plethora of international organizations. Students and professionals come to this country for its world-class universities (EPFL, ETHZ) and attractive companies (see below). We estimate that our community currently is made up of 80+% of internationals. For that reason, members of our community might be more open-minded than the average EA community because they have already experienced different countries or cultures, as it seems that many in our community have moved from where they grew up. While English proficiency levels among young Swiss people are only average, we experience good levels from our community members and English proficiency is not as much of a barrier to being part of the global community as in other non-English speaking countries.

Low Emigration

People seem reluctant to leave Switzerland once they have settled. We believe the main reasons for this are financial stability and high standards of living. This was reflected in the 2022 EA Survey: “Switzerland, though a small country in terms of its share of respondents, also has an especially large ratio of residents to people who were born there—almost double”. This goes against the general observation that high-impact EAs tend to relocate more. However, we lack local initiatives that provide EA-aligned projects to the local community, thus failing to motivate individuals to choose high-impact opportunities over less impactful jobs, ultimately limiting our potential impact. Companies like Google, Meta, IBM, or other tech/​finance companies that offer attractive salaries and many benefits are a very powerful magnet for well-trained engineers and talented people that more impactful projects could benefit from. This feels especially true for people from an engineering background (e.g. from EPFL or ETH Zurich) but is also relevant for social sciences and policy, e.g. for the international hub that Geneva is.

Our Values

We believe the community’s culture is crucial to its impact. Therefore we wanted to lay out the values we care about the most.

  • Compassion

    • We feel the current and potential suffering in the world, and we take it seriously.

    • We are grateful for having the opportunity to make a difference. We strive to leverage our privilege.

  • Agency

    • We realize the incredible position we are in, and we have the courage to take action to get the most out of it.

    • We are driven by our vision of a much better world. We are ambitious in our goals, and aim for exceptional impact.

  • Truth-seeking

    • We strive to be scouts. We are open to being wrong, and we are considerate of others’ points of view—even in disagreements.

    • We look for the best opportunities to do good and aim to question our assumptions and conclusions to better reach our ultimate goal.

  • Solidarity

    • We help each other. We are motivated to seek help and give it in return to go further, together.

    • We demonstrate empathy toward each other. We believe kindness and compassion are essential behaviors for any community.

  • Independence

    • We are aligned with the values of the Effective Altruism movement, but that does not prevent us from being an independent community that works to act on what its members believe is the most impactful.

    • We seek feedback from stakeholders outside of our community, always aiming for continuous improvement

Why? - Our approach to Effective Altruism and community building

Our Framework

You will find in Annex 1 a snapshot of the considerations, with relevant resources, that have informed our decisions.

Trajectories: What are people’s journey to impact?

We identified two trajectories for Effective Altruism (EA) community building and we want to explore where our beliefs stand in the spectrum.[3]

It is important to add here that the definition of EA that we use here is the one framing it as a question.

  • The Question-First Trajectory: people initially get involved in EA because they believe in its principles (see for example EA is three radical ideas I want to protect) and want to find a way to do good and have a positive impact on the world. It’s member-first and attracts more generalists. It goes in the direction of “big-tent EA”, as we are giving people the opportunity to define what impact means for them.

    • In that trajectory, the community might be more of a social circle.

    • The focus for us is on the community and its diversity. It’s more inclusive.[4]

    • (+) It might be easier for people to shift careers if they first adhere to the principles instead of the cause area.

    • (-) People on this trajectory might be more reluctant to settle on an impact path and thus to experiment and learn.

      • We should encourage people to take an exploratory approach and manifest agency in experimenting to figure out their path to impact.

    • (-) EA-principles are abstract and some people bump off before getting in contact with concrete impact paths.

  • The Answer-First Trajectory: people are interested in a specific cause area (artificial intelligence, biosecurity, alternative proteins, climate change, animal welfare, etc.), join events organized by EA-associated groups, and then become aware of EA through those events. We still want people to be sensitive to the core concepts of EA, to focus on the most impactful interventions, and be able to reassess their chosen career path if needed. It’s cause-first and attracts more specialists. It’s keeping EA more “small-tent”, as we’re not necessarily expanding the cause areas we care about.

    • In that trajectory, the community might be more of a professional circle.

    • The focus for us is on identifying people and projects that can have the most impact within relevant causes according to our current thinking. It’s more exclusive.

    • (+) It might be easier to sell concrete ideas and topics rather than philosophical ideas.

    • (+) It provides more opportunities for us to be “fishing in ponds” for people who might find interest in EA.

    • (-) People might drift away from the core EA principles and ideas[5]

      • People might be less open to being wrong if their identity is more linked to the topics than the concepts. This can also trigger groupthink and self-sustaining feedback loops.

      • People within these groups might not work on the most impactful opportunities, because they never cared as much about that principle, even though they are working in the most impactful cause areas.

    • (-) We might lack enablers and catalysts that are driven by supporting projects they believe in without being particularly motivated by the specific cause area. This would be solved by a large enough community that contains both trajectories.

Tracks: What structures do we build to support people in their journey?

With the context about trajectories above, we approach community building using those two independent but intersecting tracks, following two different priorities:

  • The EA-Principles Track: focusing on spreading EA ideas and concepts: e.g. by:

    • Showcasing Intro to EA talks and fellowships, regularly questioning our goals and our vision and valuing critical thinking of what is seen as most impactful within the community.

    • Featuring resources explaining philosophical concepts important to EA, such as understanding scope sensitivity, radical empathy, and the scout mindset.

    • Empowering better decision-making, forecasting, red teaming, and epistemic pluralism.

    • A typical path on the rails of that track would be (using the Funnel Model framework from CEA):

      • Audience: Hearing about EA via a talk at a Swiss university

      • Follower: Subscribing to the EACH newsletter, joining the Slack and/​or events

      • Participant: Joining an Intro to EA fellowship, joining an EACH Retreat

      • Contributor: Helping a local/​the national organizing team while learning more, reading, and getting career advice

      • Core: Applying for grants or roles for EA-aligned projects

  • The Cause-Specific Track(s): focusing on supporting cause areas, projects, and people that we currently believe have the highest impact, e.g. by:

    • Supporting groups and subgroups that are aligned with our beliefs, such as the different AI Safety (AIS) groups and projects (Swiss AI Safety Camps) in Switzerland, Pivotal or the Alternative Protein Projects (APP)

    • Organizing talks and proactively looking for and incubating projects to develop the GCR field, such as Biosecurity-focused groups.

    • Developing the dialogue and collaborations with institutions and organizations outside of the EA ecosystem via collaborations and projects.

    • A typical path on those rails could be:

      • Audience: Hearing about a GCR-focused event organized by EA Switzerland or a cause-specific local group.

      • Follower: Subscribing to the calendar of a cause-specific group and join events (e.g. Safe AI Lausanne organizing roundtable)

      • Participant: Helping an organizing team, join e.g. Alignment Jams, Biosecurity Fellowship

      • Contributor: Applying and participating Pivotal Research Fellowship, organizing the next edition of the Swiss AI Safety Camp

      • Core: Applying for a grant, e.g. to do independent research, applying for jobs in relevant organizations

This multiple-track structure aims to support community members from both trajectories:

  • For the Question-First Trajectory, one might start on the EA-Principles Track, then decide on one cause area they want to explore and jump on the Cause-Specific Track for that one. They might go back and forth between the two.

  • For the Answer-First Trajectory, people will likely start on one Cause-Specific Track, as they were attracted by a concrete way of doing good. Ideally, they come in contact with EA and learn more about approaching their strategy for impact with EA concepts and frameworks by spending some time on the EA-Principles Track.

Our Priorities

Track Portfolio

It’s worth mentioning that this is not how we view our approach to community building for Effective Altruism in the long-term, but given the current considerations and landscape, and our knowledge as a national community-building team, we think this could be one of the ways to achieve our goals in the medium-term. Ideally, we would do more EA-principles work, but we are very keen on supporting cause-specific initiatives to progress faster on that front, when possible.

With those considerations in mind, we will be using the track model to guide our community-building efforts in Switzerland, and define our portfolio of activities with the following estimates:

  • EA-Principles Track: 60%

    • We want to focus the majority of our efforts on EA-principles community building.

    • There are different wagons in which one can hop on, and we want them to have adequate capacities:

      • Talent-moving

        • We would like our efforts to be largely focused on bringing talents to this track and provide them with the relevant opportunities there during their journey.

      • Meta-thinking

        • Then, we are interested in fostering environments where progress is made on Effective Altruism at a meta-level, individually or at bigger scales (of the group, or even the community).

      • Donation-moving

        • Finally, we want to spend some of our resources to motivate more impactful donations.

  • Cause-Specific Tracks: 40%

    • We still want to spend a significant amount of our resources on pushing cause-specific projects forward, as we think a lot of the impact lies there.

    • The different wagons would then be:

      • Talent-moving

        • We would like the majority of the efforts to be going to supporting talents through the cause-specific funnel (though in absolute terms, approximately the same amount of efforts as for the EA-principles track).

      • Meta-thinking

        • We are keen to encourage meta-thinking in cause-specific groups on the best way to have an impact in that specific cause area

It’s important to signal that there are many intersections between those parallel tracks, and that many people or projects will go from one to the other several times.

Operational Work

Foundationally, part of our work also includes operational work, which is necessary for keeping the boat afloat and supports both tracks. We have to dedicate part of our resources to this work, which has a ‘fixed cost’ that cannot be cut completely and has been highly variable and unpredictable in the past.[6] Given that, we exclude operational work from the allocation above and only include actual community-building efforts.

You can also find in Annex 2 some reflections about splitting work between “maintaining and improving” and “developing and creating” at EA Switzerland.

What? - Activities we want to be doing

Our Theory of Change

In our Theory of Change, we detail our long-term, big-picture goal on the far right: getting more people to have more positive impact. Going from left to right, you will see how the different activities we undertake contribute to this goal, via intermediate outcomes. We also specify our assumptions as to why our activities make sense, and we will soon focus on adding indicators of our success to the map.

Strategies from meta-EA regional organizations (MEAROs) usually lack an emphasis on social support ecosystems and nurturing a long-term community as part of their theory of change. See Annex 3 for some thoughts on this topic.

Annual Calendar

Here is what we envision a typical year at EACH will look like. This does not mean that we achieve running all these events in a given year, it’s an annual calendar we strive for.

Event

Track

Time

Type

Organized by

Annual Reporting
General Operations

N/​A

Dec-Feb

Operations

EACH

EA Intro Talks

EA Principles

Spring Semester start (Feb-Mar)

One-Off Event

EACH or Local Groups[7]

General Assembly (Annual Duties)

N/​A

Mar-Apr

Operations

EACH

Regular Local Meetups

EA Principles and Cause Specific

Spring semester

Recurring Events

Local Groups

Cause-specific Fellowships

Cause Specific

Spring semester

Fellowships

online[8],

Local Groups or EACH

Cause-specific Talks

Cause Specific

Spring semester

One-Off Event

Local Groups or EACH

Career Planning Program

EA Principles

Spring semester

Fellowships

online[8]

or EACH

Spring EACH Retreat

EA Principles

Apr-May

One-Off Event

EACH

Regular Local Meetups

Focus on Socials

EA Principles

&

Cause Specific

Summer

Recurring Events

Local Groups

Strategy Updating + Strategy Day with Advisors

N/​A

Summer

Operations

EACH

Reporting to Funders

General Operations

N/​A

Summer

Operations

EACH

Collaborators Retreat

EA Principles

Aug-Sept

One-Off Event

EACH

EA Intro Talks

EA Principles

Fall semester start (Sept-Oct)

One-Off Event

EACH or Local Groups[7]

Regular Local Meetups

EA Principles

&

Cause Specific

Fall semester

Recurring Events

Local Groups

EA Intro Fellowship (“Impact Seminar”)

Cause-specific Fellowships

EA Principles

&

Cause Specific

Fall semester

Fellowships

online[8],

Local Groups or EACH

Cause-specific Talks

Cause Specific

Fall semester

One-Off Event

EACH

Resources

EA Switzerland’s Resources can be found here.

Additionally to our resources wiki, we have:

  • Career Advising

  • People Support

    • Meet regularly to think about community members we want to actively interact with and support; reach out and have 1-on-1s

    • Nudge people to apply for Career Advising

How? - Processes we follow

Staff Handbook

Impact Framework

Quarterly Goals

We use quarterly goals to keep track of our ambitions and objectives. You can find a template of our spreadsheet here. We evaluate them every month and update our board accordingly, and at the end of every quarter, we make notes about our achievements and give grades to how happy we are with our progress on each item of our quarterly goals.

Monitoring & Evaluation

We are currently building a Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) framework for EA Switzerland, following a playbook providing by the Community Building Grants Program. Hence, we are still defining how exactly this should look like.

Team Framework

We believe sharing our work structure might be useful for others to get inspiration and/​or reproduce. See Annex 4 for a more detailed description of those dedicated team meetings.

  • On a daily basis:

    • We cowork on GatherTown almost daily. We usually work from the couches silently but have a low bar to ask for a quick chat when needed.

    • We have a dedicated Slack channel where we post:

      • When we check in (usually in the morning)

      • Our daily goals (usually after check-in)

      • When we check out (and then we edit the daily goals to strike what was done during the day)

  • On a weekly basis:

    • We meet 30-60 min every Monday before lunch for a Weekly Check-In, and we update each other on our mood, how our weekend has been, our projects for the week, what we might be struggling with and needing help for.

    • We meet 30-60 min every Friday in the afternoon for a Weekly Check-Out, where we ask each other how the week has been, how far we made it through our goals, what went well and what didn’t, and the plans for next week.

  • On a monthly basis:

    • Once a month, each of us make the trip to the other’s city (Alix to Zurich and Marcel to Geneva) to have in-person 2-day working time every two weeks. We make those times count by hosting important team meetings when we’re in person:

    • Every early-month, we meet to have a Mutual Mentoring session.

    • Every mid-month, we meet to talk about our Team Dynamics and give each other feedback. We found this to be foundational for the good functioning of the team.

We also worked on “Work With Me” docs[9] and on Team Norms. We have a quite thorough Onboarding Guide when new people join the team.

Logistics

Our Staff Handbook includes, additionally, resources and guidance on time management, finances & expenses, and employment.

Operational Handbook

[WIP] – to handle operational tasks like employment, accidents, etc. with detailed processes

Annexes

Annex 1: Strategizing Considerations

Funding Considerations

In light of recent learnings about how community building is funded, it’s also unclear how much the fact that money mainly comes from longtermist-/​existential-risk-oriented funds should inform that decision. Indeed, 80%-90% of EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) and CEA’s Community Building Grants (CBG) program is being funded by Open Philanthropy’s (OP) Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team. By contrast, OP’s Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing) doesn’t focus much on funding general EA Community Building (CB) work. While we shouldn’t automatically defer to funders’ opinions, their priorities are an indicator of our CB work. Moreover, OP estimates that one talent moved toward x-risk is worth much more (monetarily speaking) than toward better neartermist interventions.

If we choose that we don’t agree with a portfolio mainly oriented by the cause-specific narrative (even if that is what our funding suggests), will we still end up aligning with funders’ wishes? A principle-based approach has high chances to still convince a significant part of new members to shift their careers to causes that funders currently believe are where most of the effort should go, as this is a train of thought that has proven to convince many others in the past. But is that reasonable? Is that legitimate?

We want to believe that people coming into the community for its principles will do the mental work for themselves and figure out what is most impactful and that they should work on that. Hopefully, they end up actually choosing something in the tail end of impactfulness, and we might believe that it’s AI safety & governance or biosecurity, but we want to still be in a position where we can be proved wrong by someone who has the right mindset and that decides another path for themself, which might happen less if we focus on featuring cause-specific programs. We might still want to put more effort into one or the other cause, but we don’t want to steer away from cause neutrality.

Additional Considerations

Regarding the focus on talent moving vs. donation moving: we believe that adding one Giving What We Can (GWWC) signature is not as impactful as supporting one career change. Hence, we are not convinced that, even though Swiss residents are usually wealthy, this should be our priority. Nonetheless, we are keen to explore a potential synergy between high-income professionals and local initiatives that could be funded by those donors.

However, when focusing on impact, e.g. through career change, one should keep in mind that there is high uncertainty on whether Effective Altruism is an adequate brand for wide public outreach (see Ben Todd: My updates after FTX), and as Claire Zabel (from OP) states in EA and Longtermism—not a crux for saving the world, x-risk (from AI and biological agents) have gained a lot of traction in wider society. Funneling people through EA towards these cause areas likely is not the most effective way.

Other interventions such as William MacAskill’s comment on the EA Forum saying he is afraid that AI might eat EA, and General support for “General EA” have informed our decisions.

We are also investigating the implications of two essential but opposite facets of our work: community building and focus on impact. Indeed, the former is inclusive and tries to ensure everybody feels like they belong within the EA community, and the latter is exclusive and seek to identify high-potential individuals that could benefit from more support to reach the maximum impact they can have. This is well described in The Craft is Not The Community by Otium.

Annex 2: Maintain & Improve vs. Develop & Create

Apart from the type of activities among which we are dividing our resources, there is a second dimension where a split must be applied: maintain and improve vs develop and create.

  • Maintaining & Improving aims to keep the best activities running “in the roster” and improving them at the same time. Running worthwhile activities repeatedly will take a certain effort year after year (“maintain”). At the same time, we aim to “improve” these activities e.g. by eliminating inefficiencies and involving standardizing processes, etc.

    • This is maybe more evidence-based.

    • Examples: improve programs, perfect group support, gain expertise in career advising, etc.

  • Develop & Create involves experimentation, creativity, and risk-taking. It is a challenge to “business-as-usual” and aims to pioneer new services.

    • This is maybe more hits-based.

    • Examples: new programs and events, incubate projects, expand activities, etc.

Our current choice with respect to this maintain-&-improve-vs.-develop-&-create split lies somewhere between 70:30 and 50:50. We would like to work to clarify the different projects that belong in each category.

The current two individuals in the team each have a different mindset—one more focused on consolidation (Marcel) and the other more on innovation (Alix). Hence, one could imagine an asymmetrical division of work between the two.

  • For an overall objective of 70:30, the split between the two persons in the team could be 80:20 for the first one and 60:40 for the second

  • For an overall objective of 50:50, this could mean 80:20 and 20:80 for each individual in the team

One difficulty in splitting the responsibilities up in this way, is that both team members work more by themselves which can feel unmotivating. We are not sure yet how to solve this.

Annex 3: Social Support Ecosystems & EA Community Building

EA and EACH have traditionally focused on university groups and student engagement, aiming to influence high-impact career planning and donation decisions. While this approach has shown success in initiating individuals into the EA community, it inherently has a short-term focus (in community-building terms) due to the transient nature of student populations, leading to a continual need to rebuild and re-engage new cohorts.

EA Switzerland recognizes the need to expand our strategy to include long-lasting community building as a means to achieve more sustainable social change and impactful decision-making. Long-term community members can nurture the social fabric, provide mentorship, share resources, and maintain institutional knowledge. However, this effort is by definition local at the city level—compared to the national level, which is more of EACH’s prerogative.

A tentative alternative framework to better include those considerations:

  1. Establishing Core Groups &Institutionalizing Community Structures

    1. Identification: Identify and recruit individuals committed to EA principles who plan to stay in the area long-term.

    2. Resource Sharing: Create a repository of resources, best practices, and institutional knowledge accessible to all members.

    3. Leadership Development: Train and empower community leaders to sustain and grow the community.

  2. Strengthening Social Bonds:

    1. Social Events: Organize social events that promote friendship and trust among members, such as dinners, outings, and group projects.

  3. Facilitating Personal Development:

    1. Continuous Learning: Provide opportunities for continuous learning and development through workshops, seminars, and reading groups.

    2. Support Networks: Develop support networks that address members’ personal and professional needs, reinforcing the community’s role in their lives.

    3. Collaboration on Projects: Encourage collaboration on high-impact projects that leverage the diverse skills and expertise of community members.

The goal is to create an environment where individuals are empowered to make impactful decisions with the backing of a supportive community. We are exploring how MEAROs such as EACH could implement such a theory of change and whether it stays secondary, or if it should become the main local strategy.

Annex 4: Team Dynamics—Details

  • On a weekly basis:

    • We meet 30-60 min every Monday before lunch for a Weekly Check-In, and we update each other on our mood, how our weekend has been, our projects for the week, what we might be struggling with and needing help for. The prompts are:

      • How was your weekend? How are you (mood)? What could significantly impact your mood this week?

      • Most important projects this week?

      • It’s Friday, and an important task has been ugh. Which one? (murphy-jitsu) How can the team help you this week? Personally? Professionally?

      • Other points (Status updates, current projects, bottlenecks, things we want to discuss together, etc)

      • Action items

    • We meet 30-60 min every Friday in the afternoon for a Weekly Check-Out, where we ask each other how the week has been, how far we made it through our goals, what went well and what didn’t, and the plans for next week. The prompts are:

      • What did you get done this week?

      • Who did you talk to that everybody should be aware of?

      • What tasks did we enjoy/​not enjoy?

      • Cleaned up project management system?[10]

      • What’s the plan/​focus for next week?

      • Any discussion points?

  • On a monthly basis:

    • Once a month, each of us make the trip to the other’s city (Alix to Zurich and Marcel to Geneva) to have in-person working time every two weeks. We make those times count by hosting important team meetings when we’re in person:

    • Every early-month, we meet to have a Mutual Mentoring session. The prompts are:

      • What was your goals for the past month? quarter?

      • What did you or did you not manage to accomplish?

      • How are you feeling?

      • How can you improve?

        • Trigger-Action-Plan: can you tie your goal to a specific action, enabling turning it into a habit?

        • Goal Factoring: are there goals you could better achieve with alternative behaviors?

        • Murphyjitsu: how can you strengthen your plan until you would be shocked if it didn’t work?

      • What are your goals for the next month? quarter?

      • How can we assist each other?

    • Every mid-month, we meet to talk about our Team Dynamics and give each other feedback. We found this to be foundational for the good functioning of the team. The prompts are:

      • How do you find working with the team?

      • Do you think we’re headed in the right direction as a team?

      • Is there anything we can do to improve team dynamics? How can we make this more effective and more fun? What’s something we can/​should start doing as a team?

      • Are there any aspects of our team culture/​company culture you wish you could change?

      • What’s one thing we can do to improve internal communication?

      • How is the workload? Should we redistribute responsibilities?

      • Let’s give ourself constructive feedback

        • What is a difficult but useful conversation that you think could be had in our team that we are not having?

        • Prompts: Keep doing/​Start doing/​Stop doing

        • Feedback

          • Two positive points

          • Two development points

Glossary

CB: community building

OP: Open Philanthropy

X-risks: existential risks

  1. ^

    It is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of our community does not originally come from Switzerland.

  2. ^

    1 FTE position (e.g. for community building) probably pays for 1,5 or more FTE positions in other European countries.

  3. ^

    Disclaimer: We bundled in there some perspectives on community building that are not completely collinear in their meaning, but that have a significant overlap in what it means for community building strategy.

  4. ^

    Though some might have a more exclusive vision for the “community”, allowing for more control over group culture and dynamics

  5. ^

    EACH offering strategic and operational support through regular check-ins and fiscal sponsorship/​platform sharing respectively.

  6. ^

    2023 was very heavy in technical debt and operational fixing, so we spent an unusually high amount of time on operations, giving us a hard time estimating how much we spend on operations typically.

  7. ^

    Depending on group size/​capacity. If EACH does the talk, groups should take care of logistics.

  8. ^

    Advertising online programs by other organizations (e.g. CEA’s virtual programs, BDI’s programs)

  9. ^

    There, each of us wrote on a separate doc about what we like and dislike, what motivates us, what we’re good at or bad at, our triggers and enablers, etc. Alix is happy to share hers if you ask.

  10. ^

    At EA Switzerland we use Asana.

Alix Pham22 Jul 2024 9:16 UTC
37 points
3 comments19 min readEA link