Thanks, Akash! I haven’t thought a lot about how this might apply to larger-scale events like retreats, but this makes a lot of sense to me. Somewhat unrelatedly, I think it’d be nice to have a catalog / google doc of workshops that are all about skill-building (or “learning together or working on interesting unsolved problems together.” as you put it). I felt like the Bright Futures Retreat had a lot of good examples of this. University group organizers then have a good reference of what types of events are useful, and they can either 1) use the catalog as inspiration for spin-off workshops 2) host workshops from the catalog as one-off events during term, or 3) compile their favorites for a retreat. This would likely save them a lot of time and diminish the amount of ops-related work they do.
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Good catch! I’ve just edited to correct this, thanks.
Community Builders Spend Too Much Time Community Building
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Hi! I’m Emma, I’m a student at Stanford on a full time CBG for the summer. I’m very interested in EA marketing and run @dailydosenews on TikTok/Instagram, which I’m in the process of make EA-aligned.
Thanks, Thomas! I think that’s a fair criticism. What I was trying to get at with “some actions that fall within the category of skill building would be extremely useful for some and trivial for others” is that to a certain extent, it’s up to the individual to define what skill building is for them. I’m amenable to the fact that maybe these definitions weren’t lenient enough to a range of career paths. I do worry, however, that too many individuals are going into ops/community building without building up other aptitudes.
Referring to your last paragraph, I think it’d be better if a group organizer could get those same skills in something a bit more catered to a prospective career path, although maybe this is unrealistic. This also doesn’t hold if the individual’s career interest is in ops.