Do you believe the EA community’s overall level of investment in community building is adequate/too low/too high?
(While this question isn’t strictly about CEA itself, I’d imagine a key motivating belief for many CEA staff members would be that community building work is neglected relative to other high impact opportunities.)
I think we could be doing a lot more to support community building using events! This is one reason I’m so excited about the two roles I posted for my team.
In particular, I’m always inspired by how well EAGx teams do. We provide them a bit of support, mentorship, and money and they create events that can be quite impactful. One of the events roles we posted, the Community Events Manager, is meant to take this to the next level by supporting a portfolio of community run events (which could include a wide range of events formats!). We have seen community members take initiative to run things on their own with very little money and support and this feels awesome and like a shame. I’m impressed with what folks have been able to do on there own, but it seems like we are leaving value on the table by not helping community run events more. I’m hopeful that we will find someone who can fix that!
I also think our internal events could do more with the right person, which is why we posted a pretty broad second job of Events Generalist. I think I’ve fallen down by not doing as much as impact analysis on events as I could. In my perfect world I would add someone to the team who could help me with that. But even adding another team member who could help run targeted retreats or scale up our mentorship around events or a variety of other things would mean we could invest more in the community. I’m hopeful that we will find someone who can help us do that!
I sometimes speak to people who aren’t aware how many career paths in community building there are, even outside of EA. I do think this causes there to be fewer community builders than there “should” be.
It feels hard to make really broad statements though; some people’s skills and interests are pretty clearly not a fit for community building, and I don’t think they should try to force it.
(Sharing impressions, there’s no well-developed theory here)
Intuitively, I’d say somewhere between “too low” and “adequate”.
I’m not very involved in groups work, so my knowledge on that side is limited, but I don’t have the impression that lots of potentially awesome group leaders aren’t fulfilling their potential — nothing like that. But I do think that many people who don’t see themselves as “community building” types should consider how they can contribute in small ways:
Being one more friendly/experienced face at a local event
Giving helpful advice to someone outside of EA who’s trying to make some relevant life decision (even via something as simple as “try GiveWell, they have great stuff” or “the 80,000 Hours career tool might be helpful”)
Sharing a quick Facebook post about their next donation, to make more of their social network aware of the general idea of “effective giving” (and to catch any of those people who might be in the very real category of “hears about EA, instantly sold”)
These are all very generic ideas, but depending on other things about someone (language fluency, membership in other communities, personal network), there may be other smallish things they can do. It would be interesting to see everyone past a certain level of EA familiarity (e.g. has done a fellowship or read multiple books) spend 15 minutes asking themselves “how can I do one small thing to grow the community?”
Do you believe the EA community’s overall level of investment in community building is adequate/too low/too high?
(While this question isn’t strictly about CEA itself, I’d imagine a key motivating belief for many CEA staff members would be that community building work is neglected relative to other high impact opportunities.)
I’ll answer from an events perspective:
I think we could be doing a lot more to support community building using events! This is one reason I’m so excited about the two roles I posted for my team.
In particular, I’m always inspired by how well EAGx teams do. We provide them a bit of support, mentorship, and money and they create events that can be quite impactful. One of the events roles we posted, the Community Events Manager, is meant to take this to the next level by supporting a portfolio of community run events (which could include a wide range of events formats!). We have seen community members take initiative to run things on their own with very little money and support and this feels awesome and like a shame. I’m impressed with what folks have been able to do on there own, but it seems like we are leaving value on the table by not helping community run events more. I’m hopeful that we will find someone who can fix that!
I also think our internal events could do more with the right person, which is why we posted a pretty broad second job of Events Generalist. I think I’ve fallen down by not doing as much as impact analysis on events as I could. In my perfect world I would add someone to the team who could help me with that. But even adding another team member who could help run targeted retreats or scale up our mentorship around events or a variety of other things would mean we could invest more in the community. I’m hopeful that we will find someone who can help us do that!
I sometimes speak to people who aren’t aware how many career paths in community building there are, even outside of EA. I do think this causes there to be fewer community builders than there “should” be.
It feels hard to make really broad statements though; some people’s skills and interests are pretty clearly not a fit for community building, and I don’t think they should try to force it.
(Sharing impressions, there’s no well-developed theory here)
Intuitively, I’d say somewhere between “too low” and “adequate”.
I’m not very involved in groups work, so my knowledge on that side is limited, but I don’t have the impression that lots of potentially awesome group leaders aren’t fulfilling their potential — nothing like that. But I do think that many people who don’t see themselves as “community building” types should consider how they can contribute in small ways:
Being one more friendly/experienced face at a local event
Giving helpful advice to someone outside of EA who’s trying to make some relevant life decision (even via something as simple as “try GiveWell, they have great stuff” or “the 80,000 Hours career tool might be helpful”)
Sharing a quick Facebook post about their next donation, to make more of their social network aware of the general idea of “effective giving” (and to catch any of those people who might be in the very real category of “hears about EA, instantly sold”)
These are all very generic ideas, but depending on other things about someone (language fluency, membership in other communities, personal network), there may be other smallish things they can do. It would be interesting to see everyone past a certain level of EA familiarity (e.g. has done a fellowship or read multiple books) spend 15 minutes asking themselves “how can I do one small thing to grow the community?”