I’m looking forward to CEA having a great 2020 under hopefully much more stable and certain leadership!
I’d welcome feedback on these plans via this form or in the comments, especially if you think there’s something that we’re missing or could be doing better.
This is weakly held since I don’t have any context on what’s going on internally with CEA right now.
That said: of the items listed in your summary of goals, it looks like about 80% of them involve inward-facing initiatives (hiring, spinoffs, process improvements, strategy), and 20% (3.3, 4.1-5) involve achieving concrete outcomes that affect things outside of CEA. The report on progress from last year also emphasized internal process improvements rather than external outcomes.
Of course, it makes sense that after a period of rapid leadership churn, it’s necessary to devote some time to rebuilding and improving the organization. And if you don’t have a strategy yet, I suppose it makes sense to put “develop a strategy” as your top goal and not to have very many other concrete action items.
As a bystander, though, I’ll be way more excited to read about whatever you end up deciding your strategy is, than about the management improvements that currently seems to be absorbing the bulk of CEA’s focus.
I think this is a really important point, and one I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past month. As you say, I do think that having a strategy is an important starting point, but I don’t want us to get stuck too meta. We’re still developing our strategy, but this quarter we’re planning to focus more on object-level work. Hopefully we can share more about strategy and object-level work in the future.
That said, I also think that we’ve made a lot of object-level progress in the last year, and we plan to make more this year, so we might have underemphasized that. You can read more in the (lengthy, sorry!) appendix to our 2019 post, but some highlights are:
Responding to 63 community concerns (ranging from minor situations (request for help preparing a workshop about self-care at an event) to major ones (request for help working out what to do about serious sexual harassment in a local group)).
Mentoring 50 group organizers, funding 80 projects run by groups, running group organizer retreats and making 30 grants for full-time organizers, with 25 case studies of promising people influenced by the groups we funded.
Helping around 1000 EA Global attendees make eight new connections on average, with 350 self-reported minor plan changes and 50 self-reported major plan changes (note these were self-reports, so are nowhere near as vetted as e.g. 80k plan changes).
85% growth over 10 months in our key Forum metric and 34% growth in views of EA Global talks.
~50% growth in donations to EA Funds, and millions in reported donations from GWWC members
Of course, there are lots of improvements we still need to make, but I still feel happy with this progress, and with the progress we made towards more reliably following through on commitments (e.g. addressing some of the problems with EA Grants).
Adding a little bit to Max’s comment. — When I count the number of our staff working on each section, I get ~half of staff focused on the external-facing goals. And that’s on top of the business as usual work, which is largely external facing. I was one of the people pushing for more object level work this quarter, but my feeling of the distance between what it was and what I wanted it to be was not as high as it might seem from a simple count of the number of goals.[1]
I’m looking forward to CEA having a great 2020 under hopefully much more stable and certain leadership!
This is weakly held since I don’t have any context on what’s going on internally with CEA right now.
That said: of the items listed in your summary of goals, it looks like about 80% of them involve inward-facing initiatives (hiring, spinoffs, process improvements, strategy), and 20% (3.3, 4.1-5) involve achieving concrete outcomes that affect things outside of CEA. The report on progress from last year also emphasized internal process improvements rather than external outcomes.
Of course, it makes sense that after a period of rapid leadership churn, it’s necessary to devote some time to rebuilding and improving the organization. And if you don’t have a strategy yet, I suppose it makes sense to put “develop a strategy” as your top goal and not to have very many other concrete action items.
As a bystander, though, I’ll be way more excited to read about whatever you end up deciding your strategy is, than about the management improvements that currently seems to be absorbing the bulk of CEA’s focus.
I think this is a really important point, and one I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past month. As you say, I do think that having a strategy is an important starting point, but I don’t want us to get stuck too meta. We’re still developing our strategy, but this quarter we’re planning to focus more on object-level work. Hopefully we can share more about strategy and object-level work in the future.
That said, I also think that we’ve made a lot of object-level progress in the last year, and we plan to make more this year, so we might have underemphasized that. You can read more in the (lengthy, sorry!) appendix to our 2019 post, but some highlights are:
Responding to 63 community concerns (ranging from minor situations (request for help preparing a workshop about self-care at an event) to major ones (request for help working out what to do about serious sexual harassment in a local group)).
Mentoring 50 group organizers, funding 80 projects run by groups, running group organizer retreats and making 30 grants for full-time organizers, with 25 case studies of promising people influenced by the groups we funded.
Helping around 1000 EA Global attendees make eight new connections on average, with 350 self-reported minor plan changes and 50 self-reported major plan changes (note these were self-reports, so are nowhere near as vetted as e.g. 80k plan changes).
85% growth over 10 months in our key Forum metric and 34% growth in views of EA Global talks.
~50% growth in donations to EA Funds, and millions in reported donations from GWWC members
Of course, there are lots of improvements we still need to make, but I still feel happy with this progress, and with the progress we made towards more reliably following through on commitments (e.g. addressing some of the problems with EA Grants).
Adding a little bit to Max’s comment. — When I count the number of our staff working on each section, I get ~half of staff focused on the external-facing goals. And that’s on top of the business as usual work, which is largely external facing. I was one of the people pushing for more object level work this quarter, but my feeling of the distance between what it was and what I wanted it to be was not as high as it might seem from a simple count of the number of goals.[1]
Which, to be clear, you had no way of knowing about, and you explicitly called out that it was weakly-held.