Ah, I can see why that question would come up! I didn’t see this document as “primarily about CEA’s successes and failures” – about half of the questions I asked were targeted towards things CEA directly does, but as you have noticed, about half were about the EA community in general.
As our goal is to grow and maintain the EA community, it’s important for us to understand how that community is functioning—even the aspects not directly related to CEA.
We have another post forthcoming that’s focused more specifically on CEA, and will cover the kinds of issues noted on our “mistakes” page.
Thanks for the explanation. I can understand why you’d want to publish all of the interview results in one post.
However, when that post is titled ‘feedback for CEA’, it looks like you believe that you’re responsible for the friendliness of the EA community. It’s… kind of offensive? In my view, CEA has very little to do with how friendly or unfriendly I am. This sort of information should be shared on the Forum as feedback for us, rather than treated primarily as feedback for 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.
(Along the same lines, I’d 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.)
However, when that post is titled ‘feedback for CEA’, it looks like you believe that you’re responsible for the friendliness of the EA community.
I think there may be a misunderstanding – the title of this post is “Feedback Collected by CEA”, not “for” 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, I’d 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 – the title of this post is “Feedback Collected by CEA”, not “for” 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/Summer 2019
The title doesn’t mention what the feedback is about. I think most people would assume that it refers to feedback about CEA, rather than the community overall. That’s what I assumed.
CEA collects feedback from community members in a variety of ways (see “CEA’s Feedback Process” 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 “as is,” without any endorsement by CEA.
It’s not clearly stated what the feedback is about (“CEA collects feedback”, “solicit their feedback” without elaboration of what the feedback is about). The closest it gets to specifying what feedback might pertain to is when it’s mentioned that CEA was particularly interested in feedback on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. This is still fairly vague, and “branding” to me implies that the feedback is about CEA. It does say ”...issues in EA”, but I didn’t 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 “feedback” 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 CEA’s 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 what’s 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 “medium-term events” 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/or 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/Summer 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 wasn’t intended then please edit to say something closer to
Summary of Broad Feedback About EA, Collected in Spring/Summer 2019
I was glad to see this included in the post, although I can see why it could seem weird / surprising. Since an important part of CEA’s role is to grow the EA community in a healthy way, it seems like an important outcome measure of whether CEA is doing its job is whether the EA community is in fact growing in a healthy way (and more specifically what parts of that are going well and badly). That seems like a particularly hard outcome to measure, and it would seem easy and understandable to blame others the parts that aren’t going well rather than taking responsibility and thinking about how to improve things. It’s great that you’re finding ways to get a sense of how things are going, and figuring out what CEA can do to improve things.
Ah, I can see why that question would come up! I didn’t see this document as “primarily about CEA’s successes and failures” – about half of the questions I asked were targeted towards things CEA directly does, but as you have noticed, about half were about the EA community in general.
As our goal is to grow and maintain the EA community, it’s important for us to understand how that community is functioning—even the aspects not directly related to CEA.
We have another post forthcoming that’s focused more specifically on CEA, and will cover the kinds of issues noted on our “mistakes” page.
Thanks for the explanation. I can understand why you’d want to publish all of the interview results in one post.
However, when that post is titled ‘feedback for CEA’, it looks like you believe that you’re responsible for the friendliness of the EA community. It’s… kind of offensive? In my view, CEA has very little to do with how friendly or unfriendly I am. This sort of information should be shared on the Forum as feedback for us, rather than treated primarily as feedback for 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.
(Along the same lines, I’d 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.)
Thanks for the feedback.
I think there may be a misunderstanding – the title of this post is “Feedback Collected by CEA”, not “for” 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 doesn’t mention what the feedback is about. I think most people would assume that it refers to feedback about CEA, rather than the community overall. That’s what I assumed.
It’s not clearly stated what the feedback is about (“CEA collects feedback”, “solicit their feedback” without elaboration of what the feedback is about). The closest it gets to specifying what feedback might pertain to is when it’s mentioned that CEA was particularly interested in feedback on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. This is still fairly vague, and “branding” to me implies that the feedback is about CEA. It does say ”...issues in EA”, but I didn’t pay that much importance.
In general, I assume that feedback to an organization is about the organization itself.
While unclear again about what “feedback” 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/or 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 wasn’t intended then please edit to say something closer to
Thanks for responding Ben :)
I was glad to see this included in the post, although I can see why it could seem weird / surprising. Since an important part of CEA’s role is to grow the EA community in a healthy way, it seems like an important outcome measure of whether CEA is doing its job is whether the EA community is in fact growing in a healthy way (and more specifically what parts of that are going well and badly). That seems like a particularly hard outcome to measure, and it would seem easy and understandable to blame others the parts that aren’t going well rather than taking responsibility and thinking about how to improve things. It’s great that you’re finding ways to get a sense of how things are going, and figuring out what CEA can do to improve things.