Quick facts about EA Poland: the first EA meetup we know of took place in 2014, and the first group was established in Cracow, in 2015. In 2018, the Polish Foundation for Effective Altruism (FEA) was registered. We have members from all over Poland: Cracow, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Poznan, Gdansk, Katowice, Lodz...
EA Poland
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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:
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.
Hi Henri,
Thanks for your question! Our statement permits grants from those sources but assumes they won’t cover more than 60% of the total budget.
John, Henri thank you very much for these comments, good points! We will try to address them by the end of the day.
UPDATE (24.11.23):
Thanks to your support, we have crossed the milestone of 1x 0,5FTE for 2024!
So far, we have collected $18.6k: $9k through fundraising among the Polish community members before posting on the EA forum and $9.6k since the post. It is a total of individual donations and subscriptions x14 (entire 2024 + Nov and Dec 2023)
9 more people contributing $100/month would let us reach 1 FTE.
The subscriptions currently range from ~$10/month to $500/month and each makes a difference.
To reach the optimal scenario where all 3 of us continue the work full time, we need to raise $70,7k more. There is still a long way to go, but driven by the expected value, we will fundraise our fingers to the bones.