Upvoted. It’s great when people put their requests on the forum so they can be scrutinized thoroughly by the community.
I know nothing about community building. Regardless, here are some things I think would make your case stronger to the average reader:
Listing some notable Polish EAs, especially if your outreach brought them into the movement. You’ve mentioned some organisations, but it’s costly for the reader to figure out who exactly you’re referring to and what your role was.
There are some places where vagueness could be concealing strength/weakness. For example, you’ve referred to your slack participants doubling. This could be from two people to four or from 10000 to 20000.
It seems as though you’re pursuing five strategies at once as a fairly small organisation. This is generally a bad idea, because doing one thing well is hard as it is. Can you elaborate on why you think such a broad focus is called for? (e.g. perhaps they are synergistic, or other similar orgs have had success with this approach)
It’s not clear why your plans for 2024 have been made. Can you comment a little on each and why you feel they are high EV?
I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn’t it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that’s gone unfunded from their applicant pool?
Thank you once more for the valuable feedback. We will address your points in this comment and update the post accordingly.
Now, to your points:
Listing some notable Polish EAs, especially if your outreach brought them into the movement. You’ve mentioned some organisations, but it’s costly for the reader to figure out who exactly you’re referring to and what your role was.
We think it’s a fair point and we added Karolina Sarek to Charity Entrepreneurship and Klau Chmielowska to Lafiya Nigeria. We have changed OpenCages to Anima International. That comes after the discussion with their representative who confirmed today that the Polish team from OpenCages is responsible for setting up this international initiative. Now, OpenCages is one of the chapters. We provide Jakub Stencel, as an example of EA behind this project, but more Poles were involved. Note that the team currently running EA Poland had no influence over these individuals or organizations. We mentioned them as the first argument for Poland being potentially a great source of highly talented, morally ambitious people.
2. There are some places where vagueness could be concealing strength/weakness. For example, you’ve referred to your slack participants doubling. This could be from two people to four or from 10000 to 20000.
Good point, we updated it. We are talking about going from about 15 volunteers to 30 and from ~29 daily active members in June 2022 to ~66 in November 2023.
3. It seems as though you’re pursuing five strategies at once as a fairly small organization. This is generally a bad idea, because doing one thing well is hard as it is. Can you elaborate on why you think such a broad focus is called for? (e.g. perhaps they are synergistic, or other similar orgs have had success with this approach)
That’s totally how it could be read and we have extended this part to give more context.
To begin with, we don’t think there is a clear answer as to what is the right approach to movement building in Poland (or EA movement building overall) or how to best utilize the local opportunities for positive impact exertion. Over time, we expect to gain more certainty and be able to double down on some activities. However, we are merely over one year in and we simply lack the data. That is why we decided to try out different projects, evaluate the results, pivot whenever needed, and distribute our resources in accordance with the expected value.
A crucial element that was missing in the original post we would like to add to that topic is the immense help we receive from a group of 30 dedicated volunteers (Active Members). Without them, some of the plans would probably not even be considered here, e.g. intro to EA and AI Fundamentals fellowships.
We have highlighted the role of our Active Members in the linked post, but of course, we should not expect people to jump all across the forum to find relevant information.
We think that with the current/planned (depending on the project’s status—most of them are pending, but Governance and Democracy is just a plan) responsibility and resource distribution, we can do well in each of the projects and gain necessary data to determine whether to scale-up, limit, put on hold or reject any of them.
If we suddenly lose some of our resources and can’t carry out e.g. the fellowships, it would be very unfortunate, but it does not damage the community’s health or tarnish EA’s reputation. We “just” lose the potential of the positive impact. The same can be applied to the majority of our plans.
It is probably worth adding that it is not like the focus of the three of us is stretched across all the mentioned projects. For instance, AI Safety field building coordination consumes up to 10% of Chris’s time and nearly none of the rest of the employees. We attribute most of the progress in this area to our Active Members. Moreover, the long-term goal (1-3 years) is to let some of our projects thrive as stand-alone entities and with separate management, e.g. the effective giving platform (the Dutch platform is a great example of such a successful incubation).
4. It’s not clear why your plans for 2024 have been made. Can you comment a little on each and why you feel they are high EV?
The post has been updated with the relevant information.
5. I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn’t it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that’s gone unfunded from their applicant pool?
We see that Caleb and Henri already answered and we don’t have anything more to add.
5. [...] Wouldn’t it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that’s gone unfunded from their applicant pool?
FWIW, I don’t think this Meta Charity Funders’ model. I think they let funders join rather than donate to a pool. As far as I understand, after joining you access communal resources to best decide on grants – but the decision itself of where to donate remains with yourself as original funder.
This understanding is correct. All funding decisions are made by individual members and decisions don’t necessarily reflect the aggregate view of the circle.
I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn’t it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that’s gone unfunded from their applicant pool?
As Henri says I don’t think this is their model. Also, they haven’t operated for very long, and I don’t think they claim to have much expertise in funding meta-charities (though that’s not to say they won’t do an excellent job—I think it’s just a bit more of a judgment call).
Upvoted. It’s great when people put their requests on the forum so they can be scrutinized thoroughly by the community.
I know nothing about community building. Regardless, here are some things I think would make your case stronger to the average reader:
Listing some notable Polish EAs, especially if your outreach brought them into the movement. You’ve mentioned some organisations, but it’s costly for the reader to figure out who exactly you’re referring to and what your role was.
There are some places where vagueness could be concealing strength/weakness. For example, you’ve referred to your slack participants doubling. This could be from two people to four or from 10000 to 20000.
It seems as though you’re pursuing five strategies at once as a fairly small organisation. This is generally a bad idea, because doing one thing well is hard as it is. Can you elaborate on why you think such a broad focus is called for? (e.g. perhaps they are synergistic, or other similar orgs have had success with this approach)
It’s not clear why your plans for 2024 have been made. Can you comment a little on each and why you feel they are high EV?
I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn’t it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that’s gone unfunded from their applicant pool?
Hi John,
Thank you once more for the valuable feedback. We will address your points in this comment and update the post accordingly.
Now, to your points:
We think it’s a fair point and we added Karolina Sarek to Charity Entrepreneurship and Klau Chmielowska to Lafiya Nigeria. We have changed OpenCages to Anima International. That comes after the discussion with their representative who confirmed today that the Polish team from OpenCages is responsible for setting up this international initiative. Now, OpenCages is one of the chapters. We provide Jakub Stencel, as an example of EA behind this project, but more Poles were involved. Note that the team currently running EA Poland had no influence over these individuals or organizations. We mentioned them as the first argument for Poland being potentially a great source of highly talented, morally ambitious people.
Good point, we updated it. We are talking about going from about 15 volunteers to 30 and from ~29 daily active members in June 2022 to ~66 in November 2023.
That’s totally how it could be read and we have extended this part to give more context.
To begin with, we don’t think there is a clear answer as to what is the right approach to movement building in Poland (or EA movement building overall) or how to best utilize the local opportunities for positive impact exertion. Over time, we expect to gain more certainty and be able to double down on some activities. However, we are merely over one year in and we simply lack the data. That is why we decided to try out different projects, evaluate the results, pivot whenever needed, and distribute our resources in accordance with the expected value.
A crucial element that was missing in the original post we would like to add to that topic is the immense help we receive from a group of 30 dedicated volunteers (Active Members). Without them, some of the plans would probably not even be considered here, e.g. intro to EA and AI Fundamentals fellowships.
We have highlighted the role of our Active Members in the linked post, but of course, we should not expect people to jump all across the forum to find relevant information.
We think that with the current/planned (depending on the project’s status—most of them are pending, but Governance and Democracy is just a plan) responsibility and resource distribution, we can do well in each of the projects and gain necessary data to determine whether to scale-up, limit, put on hold or reject any of them.
If we suddenly lose some of our resources and can’t carry out e.g. the fellowships, it would be very unfortunate, but it does not damage the community’s health or tarnish EA’s reputation. We “just” lose the potential of the positive impact. The same can be applied to the majority of our plans.
It is probably worth adding that it is not like the focus of the three of us is stretched across all the mentioned projects. For instance, AI Safety field building coordination consumes up to 10% of Chris’s time and nearly none of the rest of the employees. We attribute most of the progress in this area to our Active Members. Moreover, the long-term goal (1-3 years) is to let some of our projects thrive as stand-alone entities and with separate management, e.g. the effective giving platform (the Dutch platform is a great example of such a successful incubation).
The post has been updated with the relevant information.
We see that Caleb and Henri already answered and we don’t have anything more to add.
FWIW, I don’t think this Meta Charity Funders’ model. I think they let funders join rather than donate to a pool. As far as I understand, after joining you access communal resources to best decide on grants – but the decision itself of where to donate remains with yourself as original funder.
This understanding is correct. All funding decisions are made by individual members and decisions don’t necessarily reflect the aggregate view of the circle.
As Henri says I don’t think this is their model. Also, they haven’t operated for very long, and I don’t think they claim to have much expertise in funding meta-charities (though that’s not to say they won’t do an excellent job—I think it’s just a bit more of a judgment call).
John, Henri thank you very much for these comments, good points! We will try to address them by the end of the day.