I’d also be interested in pursuing this idea! LW can definitely be overwhelming, and it’d be a fun (and useful) project to take a deep dive and perhaps produce a recommended reading list for others (broadly defined).
Edward Tranter
Karma: 6
I have a similar question to Miranda! More specifically, how do group organizers fit into your target audience/thoughts regarding scope for benefit?
Thanks for this! Looks great. I was just looking up biosecurity reading lists!
I agree with Vaidehi’s comment. On top of this, would it be possible for you to estimate the amount of pages/topic? At Swarthmore EA we roughly consider a page of writing for popular audiences like books, news articles, and blog posts to be ⅖ of a page of academic writing. We’ve found that this helps us organize and compare readings better, whilst also providing helpful information for readers (i.e. allows them to schedule out a time to complete X articles better based on their reading speed).
So 250 pages, for example, of popular writing would be the equivalent of 100 pages of academic writing. But that’s very rough and obviously varies with font size and so on. Moreover, writings published in blogs or fora are sometimes sufficiently technical and detailed that one can choose to categorize them as academic; doing so is necessarily a judgment call.
This seems super exciting! Looks awesome.
Quick question: how are you going about integrating local NYC EA groups into the advertising of this Fellowship? I have the sense that uni-group organizers would be well-equipped to identify potential candidates and work with them through the application process.
Awesome—thanks for the response. Yes, I agree with the crux (this also may come from different conceptions of the skills themselves). I’ll message you!
Thanks for posting this, Aaron! I’m also applying to the role, and your thoughts are extremely well-put and on the mark.
20-50 people are going to apply for this role, of which at least 20 would do an awesome job.
I think we have two disagreements here.
My thought is that over 50 people are going to apply (my expectation is 65+); perhaps this doesn’t matter too much (quite a few disappointed people regardless), and I don’t think either of us has particularly good evidence for this.
I’m uncertain as to whether 40% (assuming your prediction of 50 applications) would do an “awesome” job. ‘Awesome’ needs to be defined further here, but, without going into the weeds, I think that a recently graduated person having a fleshed-out entrepreneurial aptitude + charisma + a deep understanding of EA is extremely rare (see Alex HT’s post).
More on the 2nd thought: I’d reckon (high uncertainty) that CEA may struggle to find more than ~12 people like this. This does not imply that there are not far more than 12 qualified people for the job. Primary reasons I think this: a) the short application timeline; b) my uncertainty about the degree of headhunting that’s gone on; and c) the fact that a lot of the best community builders I know (this is a limited dataset, however) already have jobs lined up. All of this depends on who is graduating this year and who is applying, of course.
This sounds spectacular! SwarthmoreEA is working on experimenting with competitions; this seems like an awesome item to advertise + a great model to follow.
Awesome! Thanks for the comprehensive reply. I’m in the midst of writing of first Forum post right now, and this is super helpful.
Background: I’m running two retreats this week whilst working with Swarthmore College EA. Both retreats are along the lines of what you described as a bootcamp (“where newer organisers, facilitators & similar are skilled up and gain lots of motivation from interacting with others in-person”), but for ~18 people. I think talking together about this sounds promising!
I agree with your response to casebash:
It’s true that if we had perfect organiser training either locally in the groups or in one big bootcamp, it’s unclear the bootcamp would cost less organiser hours. However organisers locally often don’t have the time/skills to train new organisers. So the comparison probs isn’t decisive.
How are you thinking about the intended ‘quality’ (broadly defined, somewhat similar to production value) of the proposed bootcamp, relative to: the quality of generic EA retreats, the retreat mentioned in your post, or a larger event like Icecone? I’d love more details on this.
This post is really great—well done! I really admire the analogy and think that it works well; its definitely altered my thinking about self-care. How long did it take you to write this?
This is SO good! Thanks for writing so clearly; I’ll definitely be incorporating this into my scheduling patterns :)