EA Barcelona: Our first year of impact

TL;DR: 2023 was the first year that EA Barcelona has had a designated community builder (me!), and our community has grown substantially as a result. This post summarises what went well, what we found challenging and our plans for 2024.

Disclaimer: This is my first EA forum post and I’m nervous. This time a year ago, I didn’t really know what an “x-risk” was, and I pronounced “utilitarianism” as “utalatarianism” (but hey, I wasn’t the only one!). But things have changed a lot since then, so I wrote this post with different goals in mind: to reflect, to inform, to entertain and (hopefully) to inspire. Also, I come from an Arts background, and I think it’s kind of nice to balance AI Safety heavy stuff with lighter fun stuff from time to time.

Shoutout: This post was partially inspired by (but can never live up to) the post The Spanish Speaking Effective Altruism community is awesome! written by Jaime Sevilla.

EA Barcelona: We are now officially the poster children of the CEA Groups Resource Centre page “How do EA groups produce impact?” #proud

Some context on EA in Spain & in Barcelona

There have been a number of attempts to build an EA community in Spain over the years. In Madrid circa 2019, there was quite an active community infamously known as “Jaime and the Pablos”, who held weekly activities and organized several larger events as well. And in Barcelona, there was also a small but passionate group meeting up regularly around the same time. However, due to the pandemic, changes in direction and other factors, neither one continued beyond 2020 as a formally coordinated, sustainable local group.

Fast forward to July 2021 and enter another Pablo: Pablo Rosado—principal data scientist at Our World In Data and also my partner. Pablo R. had been learning about EA online and trying to apply its principles to his life for a couple of years already when he discovered the semi-dormant EA Barcelona Facebook page. He noticed that a couple of guys were planning to meet up and “have a chat about EA” that afternoon, so he went off to meet them and didn’t come back until about 7 hours later. And that was the origins of what is now the second wave of EA Barcelona—kudos to Sam Bakeysfield, Miguel Gimeno and others for taking the initiative back then! This small group continued meeting up for their long and thought-provoking chats from time to time, until eventually I got curious and started tagging along too. Then in 2022, once Sam had moved to Portugal and Miguel to The Netherlands, Pablo and I decided to take over as group organisers. For the rest of the year, we ran a couple of introductory talks and arranged the odd casual meeting for the tiny number of EAs who remained.

Then, in April 2023, after attending the amazingly inspiring EAGxLatAm in Mexico City, quitting my job immediately afterwards and taking a 2-month sabbatical in Australia to visit friends and family, I applied for funding from the EAIF to do community building professionally. I returned to Barcelona to the exciting news that I had been awarded the grant, and the rest is history! Well, 8 months of history for now.

EA Barcelona finally starts to take shape

I started on the grant in May, and what a whirlwind of a time it’s been since then! We’ve run lots of different kinds of events, such as expert talks, discussion groups, coworking sessions and social activities, and we’ve managed to attract a diverse group of interested people to the movement.

Here are a few highlights of 2023, as always best expressed in images and (occasionally amusing) captions:

Pablo R. talking about how climate “doomerism” is just as bad as climate denial, as it leads to inaction—the total opposite of what we need right now. At an event organised by BcnAnalytics in June.

Roger Thisdell explaining how meditation practice can be used to increase our sense of compassion for others. At Apocapoc Nest City Lab in June.

Discussing the flawed notion of the “dream job” and how to apply the 80k framework to our careers in Parc de la Ciutadella in June. With hummus.

Guillem Bas from Riesgos Catastróficos Globales talking about AI governance and generally being impressive. At an event we co-organised with Adevinta in July.

Back in Parc de la Ciutadella for an EA intro picnic in August. Barcelona summers are gloriously never ending!

Pablo Melchor—one of the original “Pablos” (for a full breakdown, please refer to the official Pablo/Jaime Alignment chart here). This particular Pablo is the co-founder and president of Ayuda Efectiva (Spain’s equivalent of Giving What We Can), and can be seen here giving a very compelling talk on effective giving at Happy Scribe in September. I think this was my favourite event of the year.

The conclusion of the giving game we ran shortly after Pablo’s talk: Just give it all to the animals!

Even Luke was suitably impressed with our innovative ideas :D

Our first ever book club—having your worldview torn to pieces by Peter Singer is always easier if you don’t have to go through it alone.

They begged us just to do something fun without discussing consequentialism and deontology for a change, so we hiked up to Tibidabo one mildly windy afternoon.

Coworking in the lovely Laie Llibreria Café: 6 different nationalities and one important thing in common.

In-person viewing of EAGx virtual in November: We discovered that the best way to convince people to attend a virtual conference is to “unvirtualise” the conference :)

Our main achievements in 2023

Our overarching goal was to both consolidate and grow the local EA community for the rest of the year (May through December). Given the humble state EA Barcelona was in prior to this, having about 5-7 committed members and very few activities, I would say that we have achieved this: We now have around 20 active^[1] (including 12 highly engaged) and 50 passive^[2] members, and several different activities each month. And beyond this, we’ve managed to spread the ideas and values of effective altruism to hundreds more people in Barcelona.

Here are some other cool things that happened:

The key speaker at our talk on AI governance, Guillem Bas, was recently included in the 35 under 35 list by CIDOB and Santander, an achievement which will likely open more doors for him in the future. He was nominated by someone who came to the talk and left with a good impression.
14 people attended the EAGxVirtual in-person event, which was rated as one of the most valuable events of the year. Had there been no opportunity to view it in person, it’s likely that only a small minority would have attended from home and found the experience much less rewarding.
Pablo R. signed the 10% pledge and made a video about it for his Youtube channel.
Three members decided to redirect their donations to GiveWell recommended charities, and all stated that their involvement with EA Barcelona was “quite influential” in these decisions.
One member got into and is currently doing the Organizer Support Program, as he’s planning to start an EA university group in early 2024. To my knowledge, this will be Spain’s first EVER uni group!

Some issues we’ve faced

Community building is not without its challenges, as many of you on this forum know very well. Here were some of ours:

Language barrier

Barcelona is a dynamic, cosmopolitan city full of people from all over the world. And given the international crowd that most of our events attract, English tends to be the default language used. This was sometimes problematic because the mother tongues of most people who live here are Catalan and/or Spanish. And while EA does tend to attract people who are at least competent in English, it shouldn’t mean we exclude local people who aren’t, and there were definitely times where communication broke down and people couldn’t understand each other. We tried to address this by running separate discussion groups in Spanish and English, which helped somewhat, but I still think we have a long way to go in making our community more linguistically inclusive. I’d be very open to hearing advice about this from other CBs working with multilingual groups.

People tend to come and go

Everyone knows that lots of great people come to Barcelona, only to leave again before very long. It’s a very transient city, and plenty of international community members have now left (like Sam), while several key people who are originally from here are now living and working abroad (like Miguel). So much movement has made it difficult to reach a critical mass, and the language issues mentioned above only make things worse, if local people are more likely to feel excluded (they are the ones more likely to stay, after all). I’m not quite sure what can be done to address this, other than safeguarding the group by reaching a critical mass of local and/or international not-likely-to-leave people, so that it doesn’t affect us as much when someone does leave. Any thoughts?

The wider Spanish-speaking community has taken a hit recently

Activity of the international Spanish-speaking EA community has decreased in general this year compared to the previous two years, since several people working on community building grants stepped down to focus on other things. This has meant that, currently, our wider community lacks a clear direction, so it’s been harder to share resources among sub-groups and to feel part of a bigger community striving for a common goal. That’s how I feel anyway. I’d be curious to know if other Spanish-speakers feel the same way or not, and what we can all do to lift our collective spirits again.

2024: Onwards and upwards?

After a productive 2023, we are excited to see what 2024 may bring for our small but growing community. Our funding situation remains unclear, but assuming everything goes according to plan, here are some things we’re excited about for this year:

Ricard Soler, multilingual vegan activist and expert on local culture, will hopefully be joining me as our second community builder. My main colleagues so far have been my two cats, so I’d be thrilled to have another human to brainstorm ideas with, and to see Ricard use his local knowledge and language skills to address some of the linguistic barriers mentioned above.
We want to start collaborating with the recently inaugurated Norrsken House: Europe’s biggest hub for tech and impact. We’re already organising an event there in February with start-ups in the alternative protein space, featuring Bruce Friedrich from The Good Food Institute, and we can’t wait!

Norrsken (pronounced “Norhien” in Swedish): We have our sights set on you.

Our youngest member will hopefully kickstart Spain’s first ever EA university group and start getting some bright, young Catalans excited about EA.
We’d love to run our first in-person introductory fellowship in Barcelona. Several community members have done intro programs online, but I think there’d be much more interest if we could deliver a program face-to-face.
We want to create our own website and FOMO-inducing video reel.

And lots more! Happy new year everyone and best of luck for 2024!

A huge thank you to all the people who’ve helped me along my journey into EA and community building, and to everyone who has supported EA Barcelona now and in the past (incomplete list): Pablo Rosado, Pablo Melchor, Jaime Sevilla, Sandra Malagón, Laura González, Lynn Tann, Guillaume Vorreux, Neil Ferro, Isabel Johnson, Sasha Berezhnoi, Sam Bakeysfield, Miguel Gimeno, Andy Masley, Ricard Soler, Michael Haeulsmann, everyone else in EA Barcelona and all the companies that have hosted us.

*Minor edits made to more accurately describe the past history of the community in Spain.

^
We define “active” as having had at least 3 touch points (i.e. attending an event or having a 1-1 with an organizer) with EA Barcelona within the last 12 months and participating regularly on social media channels.
^
We define “passive” as having had 1-2 touch points with EA Barcelona within the last 12 months and participating only occasionally or not at all on social media channels.