Building on Gleb’s comment, I’m curious to see how the new Community & Outreach Division will work with other organizations working in the focus area of ‘Community & Outreach’. At different times over the past year, I’ve considered ‘movement growth’, ‘movement development’, and ‘increasing coordination’ to be among the most promising focus areas in EA[1]. Anyway, going forward, I suggest we (internally) refer to all this just as “Community and Outreach” for ease of use.
Anyway, I’m impressed with the work of LEAN/.impact, GWWC, and EAF/SEA to dramatically increase growth and access to resources for local groups in the last year. I would’ve endorsed one of those as my top charity pick for this last year had I bothered to better assess the differences of impact between them.
Talking with Tom Ash and others, I learned LEAN, GWWC, SEA/EAF, and EA Outreach (EAO) were all working together on community & outreach. It confused me EAO and GWWC were working separately even though both were under the CEA umbrella. Also, I couldn’t get a handle on what EAO was doing in this network that was unique.
I’ve been assuming that because EAO shared staff with EA Ventures, the EAG planning team, and other projects, there have been times in the past year when EAO has been on the backburner, i.e., not an active focus of the U.S.-based CEA team. Please correct me if this assumption is wrong.
We’re unifying the teams that compose GWWC, EAO, GPP and CEA Central. We’ll divide CEA into a Community & Outreach Division and a Special Projects Division. The Community and Outreach Division will focus on the ‘core’ CEA activity, which is helping to grow and strengthen the EA community. This includes our on-line presence, local groups, EA Global, EAGx, media, marketing, and the Giving What We Can Trust.
I think it makes sense to collapse EAO under the umbrella of the new Community & Outreach division. Will this division still have any operations based in the United States? What will happen to the U.S.-based team working for the CEA? Will all the same staff be kept on working in similar roles in the new division?
Also, I suggest doing some kind of ‘exit assessment’ as EA Outreach winds down its operations. I think it’d be a shame if EAO was collapsed to reduce redundancy, but the new division and everyone in Oxford didn’t take the opportunity to learn from the experiences, the successes and trials, the U.S.-based team has faced with the novel projects they’ve worked on this year (e.g., Pareto Fellowships, EAGx, etc.)
[1] This is largely because I’m personally quite uncertain between object-level causes. I think others could very reasonably disagree with me on whether meta-level foci like ‘community and outreach’ or ‘cause prioritization’ are better to currently work on than poverty alleviation, x-risk mitigation, or animal advocacy.
One thing: despite the confusing name, from CEA’s perspective, EAO was the organisation that included EAG, EAV as parts.
Working with other groups: I hope the new structure will make it quite a bit easier for other groups to co-ordinate with CEA, because the structure will be substantially simpler.
‘Exit assessment’: This is slightly complicated by the fact that there’s no simple “we tried this project and it didn’t work” story here. But I do hope to be able to write more about what things we’ve learned at CEA in the near future.
Second the idea of an “exit interview/what we learned.” This would be helpful for the broader movement as a whole, to optimize operations/reduce mistakes.
After all, CEA is not the only organization that houses a number of units. As Evan pointed out in response to my comment below, SEA/EAF houses a number of orgs. So does .impact, with the Local Effective Altruism Network, Students for High-Impact Charity, etc.
Other orgs are taking on and collaborating on meta-projects, for example the EA Marketing Resources Bank, and it would be good to learn from CEA’s experience.
Building on Gleb’s comment, I’m curious to see how the new Community & Outreach Division will work with other organizations working in the focus area of ‘Community & Outreach’. At different times over the past year, I’ve considered ‘movement growth’, ‘movement development’, and ‘increasing coordination’ to be among the most promising focus areas in EA[1]. Anyway, going forward, I suggest we (internally) refer to all this just as “Community and Outreach” for ease of use.
Anyway, I’m impressed with the work of LEAN/.impact, GWWC, and EAF/SEA to dramatically increase growth and access to resources for local groups in the last year. I would’ve endorsed one of those as my top charity pick for this last year had I bothered to better assess the differences of impact between them.
Talking with Tom Ash and others, I learned LEAN, GWWC, SEA/EAF, and EA Outreach (EAO) were all working together on community & outreach. It confused me EAO and GWWC were working separately even though both were under the CEA umbrella. Also, I couldn’t get a handle on what EAO was doing in this network that was unique.
I’ve been assuming that because EAO shared staff with EA Ventures, the EAG planning team, and other projects, there have been times in the past year when EAO has been on the backburner, i.e., not an active focus of the U.S.-based CEA team. Please correct me if this assumption is wrong.
I think it makes sense to collapse EAO under the umbrella of the new Community & Outreach division. Will this division still have any operations based in the United States? What will happen to the U.S.-based team working for the CEA? Will all the same staff be kept on working in similar roles in the new division?
Also, I suggest doing some kind of ‘exit assessment’ as EA Outreach winds down its operations. I think it’d be a shame if EAO was collapsed to reduce redundancy, but the new division and everyone in Oxford didn’t take the opportunity to learn from the experiences, the successes and trials, the U.S.-based team has faced with the novel projects they’ve worked on this year (e.g., Pareto Fellowships, EAGx, etc.)
[1] This is largely because I’m personally quite uncertain between object-level causes. I think others could very reasonably disagree with me on whether meta-level foci like ‘community and outreach’ or ‘cause prioritization’ are better to currently work on than poverty alleviation, x-risk mitigation, or animal advocacy.
Thanks! Lots of points here.
One thing: despite the confusing name, from CEA’s perspective, EAO was the organisation that included EAG, EAV as parts.
Working with other groups: I hope the new structure will make it quite a bit easier for other groups to co-ordinate with CEA, because the structure will be substantially simpler.
‘Exit assessment’: This is slightly complicated by the fact that there’s no simple “we tried this project and it didn’t work” story here. But I do hope to be able to write more about what things we’ve learned at CEA in the near future.
Second the idea of an “exit interview/what we learned.” This would be helpful for the broader movement as a whole, to optimize operations/reduce mistakes.
After all, CEA is not the only organization that houses a number of units. As Evan pointed out in response to my comment below, SEA/EAF houses a number of orgs. So does .impact, with the Local Effective Altruism Network, Students for High-Impact Charity, etc.
Other orgs are taking on and collaborating on meta-projects, for example the EA Marketing Resources Bank, and it would be good to learn from CEA’s experience.