I might have missed it in your posts or discussion elsewhere, but how do you feel about connecting with (or helping connect) small university EA groups? In particular, the group I founded at Ole Miss comes to mind, in that I really struggled to find a lot of interest at the university, which I felt made it more difficult to keep interest among the remaining/existing participants (since the meetings dwindled in numbers).
Actually in the very early days of EA Anywhere, I toyed with the idea of having a separate student sub-group in part for this purpose (and for university students without EA groups). I dropped it partially for capacity reasons and partially because there didn’t seem like much demand for it, but I’d be excited about this being part of our expansion with our new organizer.
I see EA Anywhere as a good supplement to small groups. While we advertise as “a local group for people without local groups”, I think it makes a lot of sense to also work with group organizers and members from groups that are too small to warrant larger events, or with organizers that are too time-poor to run events often.
I also think this could fit well into the local group incubation pipeline we’ve considered. There’s a cycle that’s hard to break out of with small groups—if an event is so small that it’s not valuable, then less people come, then it gets smaller, then it’s even less valuable, etc. (Of course small events can be valuable if the chemistry is right with the group, but that can take a long time to facilitate.) A virtual group like EA Anywhere could potentially break groups out of that cycle by bringing in more people and ideally creating more interesting discussions from that.
Having graduated from university just before the pandemic I don’t have a sense of how interested students will be in Zoom meetings and the like in future years, which is one uncertainty I have, but I think it’s unlikely that this will be a major issue.
I might have missed it in your posts or discussion elsewhere, but how do you feel about connecting with (or helping connect) small university EA groups? In particular, the group I founded at Ole Miss comes to mind, in that I really struggled to find a lot of interest at the university, which I felt made it more difficult to keep interest among the remaining/existing participants (since the meetings dwindled in numbers).
Actually in the very early days of EA Anywhere, I toyed with the idea of having a separate student sub-group in part for this purpose (and for university students without EA groups). I dropped it partially for capacity reasons and partially because there didn’t seem like much demand for it, but I’d be excited about this being part of our expansion with our new organizer.
I see EA Anywhere as a good supplement to small groups. While we advertise as “a local group for people without local groups”, I think it makes a lot of sense to also work with group organizers and members from groups that are too small to warrant larger events, or with organizers that are too time-poor to run events often.
I also think this could fit well into the local group incubation pipeline we’ve considered. There’s a cycle that’s hard to break out of with small groups—if an event is so small that it’s not valuable, then less people come, then it gets smaller, then it’s even less valuable, etc. (Of course small events can be valuable if the chemistry is right with the group, but that can take a long time to facilitate.) A virtual group like EA Anywhere could potentially break groups out of that cycle by bringing in more people and ideally creating more interesting discussions from that.
Having graduated from university just before the pandemic I don’t have a sense of how interested students will be in Zoom meetings and the like in future years, which is one uncertainty I have, but I think it’s unlikely that this will be a major issue.