As ever, really appreciate the work on this survey, thanks for putting it together!
Since ‘personal connections’ was again the most commonly cited positive influence, I wonder if it’d be valuable to start tracking ‘perceived network closeness’ (or something similar) over time?
Something like:
“How many people in the EA community would you feel comfortable asking for help or advice about EA-related topics?”
This could give organisers and community builders a simple way to monitor how interconnected the community is—and whether that’s improving year to year. Ideally, this would be broken down region-by-region, so we could see which regions are performing particularly well.
In a perfect world, I’d love a measure of ‘impact-mobility’, but I’m not sure where the data would come from—maybe swapcard?
We previously asked this question in 2019. The modal response was 0 such connections, followed by 1-2, though there was a long tail of >10 connection respondents. Connections were also far higher for highly engaged EAs (60.7% of highly engaged EAs had >10 connections, compared to 13.7% for considerably (4/5) engaged EAs, and <2% for anyone less engaged).
We cut the question due to lack of space and it not being prioritized by core orgs making requests of us. But we’d be happy to reintroduce if there is sufficient interest.
Ah, I thought you might’ve asked this before! Thanks for the link.
If anyone reading this has a say in future surveys, for what it’s worth, I’d be keen to see this question included.
Why? Because I think there’s a lot of value in aiming to grow community capital—basically, individual career capital times coordination ability. A measure of connectedness could give a useful signal about how well we’re doing on the coordination side.
As ever, really appreciate the work on this survey, thanks for putting it together!
Since ‘personal connections’ was again the most commonly cited positive influence, I wonder if it’d be valuable to start tracking ‘perceived network closeness’ (or something similar) over time?
Something like:
This could give organisers and community builders a simple way to monitor how interconnected the community is—and whether that’s improving year to year. Ideally, this would be broken down region-by-region, so we could see which regions are performing particularly well.
In a perfect world, I’d love a measure of ‘impact-mobility’, but I’m not sure where the data would come from—maybe swapcard?
Thanks James!
We previously asked this question in 2019. The modal response was 0 such connections, followed by 1-2, though there was a long tail of >10 connection respondents. Connections were also far higher for highly engaged EAs (60.7% of highly engaged EAs had >10 connections, compared to 13.7% for considerably (4/5) engaged EAs, and <2% for anyone less engaged).
We cut the question due to lack of space and it not being prioritized by core orgs making requests of us. But we’d be happy to reintroduce if there is sufficient interest.
Ah, I thought you might’ve asked this before! Thanks for the link.
If anyone reading this has a say in future surveys, for what it’s worth, I’d be keen to see this question included.
Why? Because I think there’s a lot of value in aiming to grow community capital—basically, individual career capital times coordination ability. A measure of connectedness could give a useful signal about how well we’re doing on the coordination side.
Thanks James! Yes, we’d encourage any readers to flag what questions they would find most useful.