Ah sorry Bernadette I misunderstood your first question!
I think ‘pin down an explanation’ was probably too strong on my part, because I definitely don’t think it’d be conclusive and I do hope that we have some more qualitative research into this.
We do have professionals working on the survey this year (is that what you meant by professional involvement?) and I’ve sent your comment to them. They’re far better placed to analyze this than me!
Thanks Eric, we spoke to Garrett about this too :)
Me too! We’re in the process of creating the survey now and will be distributing it in January. This is one thing we’re going to address, and if you have suggestions about specific questions, we’d be interested in hearing them.
Hey Ben :)
We do support GWWC chapters and 80k chapters, any local EA groups.
The groups that we’ve seeded have been general EA groups, but if for some reason the group leaders wanted to focus on GWWC or 80K, that would be fine and we’d still support them.
Most of the support we offer applies to any local group. The websites we make for groups are from a standard template we made, so they’re general EA sites, but we let the groups adapt them, so I suppose they could turn them into GWWC/80K specific sites if they wanted to.
Hey! Thanks for the questions :)
Both .impact and CEA are completely independent, other than helping each other out in a general sense, or choosing to collaborate on particular projects where it makes sense to do so.
The purpose of LEAN (Local Effective Altruism Network) - a .impact project—is to seed local EA groups and support their leaders with guidance, expertise and technical resources. The purpose of the EA Hub (eahub.org) - also a .impact project—is to have a centralized site where EAs can put up an individual or group profile, record their actions and donations, find a local group in their area, find various resources etc.
This is dependent on what you’re looking for. LEAN and its website (localeanetwork.org) is good for starting and building a local group, the EA Hub is good for finding other EAs and groups, the Newsletter is good for keeping up to date with everything going on in the community. I could try and recommend the best sites and resources if you had a particular goal in mind?
I just did a very quick, rough search and there’s around 110. And there are undoubtedly more resources in English than in other languages, so this likely reflects in group demographics. If it’s something you’re interested in, there are some non-English language sites listed here: https://eahub.org/links#non-english-languages
Hope this helps.
Thanks for this, I don’t think we disagree all that much actually—let’s chat about it in our Skype.
And for anyone else that wants to chat: calendly.com/georgiedotimpact
Thanks for the question, although I’m sad that you didn’t include my jokes… ;)
I had this in an earlier iteration of the post (I’d cut it for the sake of brevity) so I’ll just paste here with some additions:
“There will be comparatively more time spent on converting medium-sized groups into large groups: we know that most of the impact so far has come from this. [In addition, focusing on city group growth is more likely to be counterfactual than focusing on university group growth]
So why spend any time at all on making sure that groups don’t die out? Well, we want to grow the community, but there is also an abundance of value in:
a) Making the community welcoming b) Building a diverse community c) Strengthening the commitment of existing EAs
...and thus having an overall greater impact.
If there is a recurring issue that people feel lonely or unwelcomed by the community [see the EA Survey and the Local Group survey], this is something we need to address for the long-term impact of EA.
Likewise, if group growth is solely dependent on pre-existing hospitable conditions and no one is helping the less likely candidates, not only do we reduce our chances of having a counterfactual impact, we’ll also miss out on a wealth of viewpoints that represent valuable opportunities for impact. [As well as making local group work more susceptible to the Schelling Effect.]”
On seeding new groups and seeing if they get large vs improving our services for the hundreds of groups we’ve already seeded:
Seeding groups and simply “seeing if they get large” would be ok—it would mean we nudged them to take the first step—but it wouldn’t be great. The point is that, based on what we’ve observed from the hundreds of groups we’ve seeded, we think they wouldn’t “get large” without our intervention. We think most of them would die out, so our work to provide encouragement and guidance is extremely valuable.
Hey—I’m replying from .impact’s Local Effective Altruism Network project (http://dotimpact.im/focusprojects/lean/). There isn’t a guide that I know of yet, though I think it’d be a good idea to create one.
There’s some non-English language websites listed on the Hub (https://eahub.org/links#non-english-languages) and some inter-group calls to look out for (https://www.facebook.com/groups/localea/events/) - you might like to suggest a call for a specific language.
We’d always encourage local groups/individuals to translate materials if they have the time and energy, though it can be a big ask.
That was a test for prospective employees...
Remember to give feedback on the newsletter here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1QNmSdB4C5VlqiHZT0ucMhmSqQhXtgHPgHoqAtl0w2K8/viewform :)
We don’t plan on doing any mass media. I can see how the bit you quoted might be related to mass media, but hopefully the rest of the post clarifies that our focus will be on resources for LEAN, since our LEAN survey showed significant demand for this.