Super excited about this! Really grateful for everyone who has worked on this. I’m like 95% confident that I would not have my current role had I not seen the posting for it on the EA Opportunity Board.
If you’re a group organizer I would make it a top priority to get the slackbot setup to be posting in one of your slack channels, and to monitor the postings so you can connect your members to opportunities they’d be a good fit for.
Excited to see this post! I really appreciated the slides you shared (so pretty!), and that the workbook includes a completed example, plus that you shared that copy that you yourself actually used.
In the workbook, I like that the order of prompting gets people to first reflect on their stage, uncertainties, and goals, before trying to select activities. I think getting people to actually chain backwards like this helps cut unnecessary steps and focus on what actually matters, and having that process be visible to group organizers so it can inform their programming & prioritization seems quite valuable.
I’m curious if you have a more step-by-step recommendation for how organizers should integrate this into their programming? One approach I imagine might work that organizers could consider:
In the end-of-intro-fellowship survey or at the start of a new semester, organizers ask participants if they’d like to have a 1-1 chat with an organizer about their takeaways from the program and potential next steps.
When booking these chats, organizers send participants this template and ask that they fill it out in advance of the meeting (if they’re interested in discussing next steps).
Ideally, the organizer also sends them a version of the workbook that they themselves have already filled out, as an example!
Part of this chat is then spent reviewing the plan, and booking a 2 month and 4 month out 15 minute follow-up check-in to see how things are going.
Organizer leaves the chat with notes about how they want to motivate & enable this group member to achieve their goals.
Participant leaves the chat with a more refined plan that’s been red teamed a bit, and they’re feeling excited and well supported towards achieve their goals.
However I could also imagine it working well to use your slides to present to a bigger audience (do you have a full presentation people could use?), or just focusing on using this workbook for people in the leadership team, or making an group-wide shared Google Drive folder where everyone creates and shares a workbook.
Sounds like this tool is still in experimental development so I wouldn’t expect a definitive recommendation—perhaps the more concise question I can ask is: “What seem to be (or have been) the most likely failure modes a group organizer may encounter when trying to implement this, and do you have any anecdotal advice or lessons-learned about overcoming these?”