It shouldn’t be such a hard sell. Why, when well stewarded meta-EA is such a ridiculously high-impact giving opportunity, and EA is full of givers searching for impact, do so few of us give to EA infrastructure?
Ultimately I think this is going to have to come from individual pledgers / EtGers who take control of their local groups via donations and reshape them into something that works for people in EA for the long haul.
It’s not such a hard sell for donors, although many of us feel on some level that protecting toddlers from malaria is more impactful than running EA socials.
The people I could never convince were the community organisers themselves. They had a guaranteed salary from philanthropic foundations; why would they give that up?
It would feel very weird and conflict-of-interest-y to fund someone in my local group to be a paid organizer, right now we’re a bunch of volunteers running it.
You say well stewarded meta-EA is very high impact. I agree in theory, but I’m not sure about how to know if something is well stewarded in practise.
Yes, learning how to recognize (and fund) good stewardship is a hard skill.
But I feel that (some) genuinely committed, longer-term EAs are exactly the kind of people who may actually be able to sit down with each other to do that.
I am speaking with experience of being a Quaker (the other seeking-focused moral ambition cult I hang out in), and the answer the Quakers have is to fund administrators, not pastors. That is, the people who take salaries for community building essentially take direction from the volunteer community organisers and get all the niggly administrative bits sorted out to ensure that the “job” of a voluntary community organiser remains fun and meaningful rather than overly stressful. It also means it costs a lot less—you don’t need that many administrators.
I could see this model working fairly well for a longer-term EA group. And it’s basically how the EA Forum works: paid administrators keep the platform going and enforce basic discipline standards, “volunteer” EAs post whatever they’re working on. And one could argue most of EAG works like this too: CEA hosts the space and food and Swapcard and enforces basic conduct standards for 1:1s, and leaves the EAs to all get on with EA-ing.
I find this quite useful to avoid the failure mode that worries me the most, namely, that once one derives a source of income from being a community builder, their incentives start to look like “do whatever gets me renovated” and less like “do whatever I really believe is most impactful”.
So separating the operations layer (professional), from the more ideological/opinionable layer (not paid) seems like a very good idea to me.
The analogy with quakers having pastor and administrator roles separated is helpful to me to put words on why I have complicated feelings about EA paid CB roles, because they are in some sense both.
I’ve advocated for this in London; I think the incentives are better. But it’s obviously a hard sell.
It shouldn’t be such a hard sell. Why, when well stewarded meta-EA is such a ridiculously high-impact giving opportunity, and EA is full of givers searching for impact, do so few of us give to EA infrastructure?
Ultimately I think this is going to have to come from individual pledgers / EtGers who take control of their local groups via donations and reshape them into something that works for people in EA for the long haul.
It’s not such a hard sell for donors, although many of us feel on some level that protecting toddlers from malaria is more impactful than running EA socials.
The people I could never convince were the community organisers themselves. They had a guaranteed salary from philanthropic foundations; why would they give that up?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while since I read your post about it:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z9gdKj7eGsy3rzurH/you-should-donate-to-ea-fundraisers-or-community-builders
It would feel very weird and conflict-of-interest-y to fund someone in my local group to be a paid organizer, right now we’re a bunch of volunteers running it.
You say well stewarded meta-EA is very high impact. I agree in theory, but I’m not sure about how to know if something is well stewarded in practise.
Yes, learning how to recognize (and fund) good stewardship is a hard skill.
But I feel that (some) genuinely committed, longer-term EAs are exactly the kind of people who may actually be able to sit down with each other to do that.
I am speaking with experience of being a Quaker (the other seeking-focused moral ambition cult I hang out in), and the answer the Quakers have is to fund administrators, not pastors. That is, the people who take salaries for community building essentially take direction from the volunteer community organisers and get all the niggly administrative bits sorted out to ensure that the “job” of a voluntary community organiser remains fun and meaningful rather than overly stressful. It also means it costs a lot less—you don’t need that many administrators.
I could see this model working fairly well for a longer-term EA group. And it’s basically how the EA Forum works: paid administrators keep the platform going and enforce basic discipline standards, “volunteer” EAs post whatever they’re working on. And one could argue most of EAG works like this too: CEA hosts the space and food and Swapcard and enforces basic conduct standards for 1:1s, and leaves the EAs to all get on with EA-ing.
I find this quite useful to avoid the failure mode that worries me the most, namely, that once one derives a source of income from being a community builder, their incentives start to look like “do whatever gets me renovated” and less like “do whatever I really believe is most impactful”.
So separating the operations layer (professional), from the more ideological/opinionable layer (not paid) seems like a very good idea to me.
The analogy with quakers having pastor and administrator roles separated is helpful to me to put words on why I have complicated feelings about EA paid CB roles, because they are in some sense both.