However, when that post is titled âfeedback for CEAâ, it looks like you believe that youâre responsible for the friendliness of the EA community.
I think there may be a misunderstanding â the title of this post is âFeedback Collected by CEAâ, not âforâ CEA.
It would probably have been easiest to make the distinction between feedback on community health and feedback on CEA by posting to separate articles, but it could have also been accomplished in the introduction.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will keep this in mind for future articles.
(Along the same lines, Iâd like more detail on specific positives and negatives about community health, especially in London. I feel like local community members are the ones who need to take the feedback forward, so we need to have access to as much quality information as possible.)
I agree that locale-specific information is important. You are probably already aware of this, but for other readers who are not: the EA Survey contains a bunch of data about geographic differences in EA. Your posts on Londondemographics come to mind as one example of local analysis that I would like to see more of.
I think there may be a misunderstanding â the title of this post is âFeedback Collected by CEAâ, not âforâ CEA.
This is fair, but I want to give some examples of why I thought this document was about feedback about CEA, with the hope of helping with communication around this in the future. Even after your clarification, the document still gives a strong impression to me of the feedback being about CEA, rather than about the community in general. Below are some quotes that make it sound that way to me, with emphasis added:
Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/âSummer 2019
The title doesnât mention what the feedback is about. I think most people would assume that it refers to feedback about CEA, rather than the community overall. Thatâs what I assumed.
CEA collects feedback from community members in a variety of ways (see âCEAâs Feedback Processâ below). In the spring and summer of 2019, we reached out to about a dozen people who work in senior positions in EA-aligned organizations to solicit their feedback. We were particularly interested to get their take on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. Despite this focus, the interviews were open-ended and tended to cover the areas each person felt was important.
This document is a summary of their feedback. The feedback is presented âas is,â without any endorsement by CEA.
Itâs not clearly stated what the feedback is about (âCEA collects feedbackâ, âsolicit their feedbackâ without elaboration of what the feedback is about). The closest it gets to specifying what feedback might pertain to is when itâs mentioned that CEA was particularly interested in feedback on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. This is still fairly vague, and âbrandingâ to me implies that the feedback is about CEA. It does say â...issues in EAâ, but I didnât pay that much importance.
This post is the first in a series of upcoming posts where we aim to share summaries of the feedback we have received.
In general, I assume that feedback to an organization is about the organization itself.
CEA has, historically, been much better at collecting feedback than at publishing the results of what we collect.
While unclear again about what âfeedbackâ refers to, in general I would expect this to mean feedback about CEA.
As some examples of other sources of feedback CEA has collected this year:
We have received about 2,000 questions, comments and suggestions via Intercom (a chat widget on many of CEAâs websites) so far this year
We hosted a group leaders retreat (27 attendees), a community builders retreat (33 attendees), and had calls with organizers from 20 EA groups asking about whatâs currently going on in their groups and how CEA can be helpful
Calls with 18 of our most prolific EA Forum users, to ask how the Forum can be made better.
A âmedium-term eventsâ survey, where we asked everyone who had attended an Individual Outreach retreat how the retreat impacted them 6-12 months later. (53 responses)
EA Global has an advisory board of ~25 people who are asked for opinions about content, conference size, format, etc., and we receive 200-400 responses to the EA Global survey from attendees each time.
All of these are examples of feedback about CEA or its events and activities. There are no examples of feedback about the community.
I think the confusion comes from the lack of clear elaboration in the title and/âor beginning of the document of what the scope of the feedback was. Clarifying this in the future should eliminate this problem.
Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/âSummer 2019
I understand CEA to have ask people questions about EA broadly and CEA specifically, and this heading says to me that the OP contains a summary of both types of feedback, not just the former. If that wasnât intended then please edit to say something closer to
Summary of Broad Feedback About EA, Collected in Spring/âSummer 2019
Thanks for the feedback.
I think there may be a misunderstanding â the title of this post is âFeedback Collected by CEAâ, not âforâ CEA.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will keep this in mind for future articles.
I agree that locale-specific information is important. You are probably already aware of this, but for other readers who are not: the EA Survey contains a bunch of data about geographic differences in EA. Your posts on London demographics come to mind as one example of local analysis that I would like to see more of.
This is fair, but I want to give some examples of why I thought this document was about feedback about CEA, with the hope of helping with communication around this in the future. Even after your clarification, the document still gives a strong impression to me of the feedback being about CEA, rather than about the community in general. Below are some quotes that make it sound that way to me, with emphasis added:
The title doesnât mention what the feedback is about. I think most people would assume that it refers to feedback about CEA, rather than the community overall. Thatâs what I assumed.
Itâs not clearly stated what the feedback is about (âCEA collects feedbackâ, âsolicit their feedbackâ without elaboration of what the feedback is about). The closest it gets to specifying what feedback might pertain to is when itâs mentioned that CEA was particularly interested in feedback on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. This is still fairly vague, and âbrandingâ to me implies that the feedback is about CEA. It does say â...issues in EAâ, but I didnât pay that much importance.
In general, I assume that feedback to an organization is about the organization itself.
While unclear again about what âfeedbackâ refers to, in general I would expect this to mean feedback about CEA.
All of these are examples of feedback about CEA or its events and activities. There are no examples of feedback about the community.
I think the confusion comes from the lack of clear elaboration in the title and/âor beginning of the document of what the scope of the feedback was. Clarifying this in the future should eliminate this problem.
Just to add to this
I understand CEA to have ask people questions about EA broadly and CEA specifically, and this heading says to me that the OP contains a summary of both types of feedback, not just the former. If that wasnât intended then please edit to say something closer to
Thanks for responding Ben :)