I run EA Anywhere, a virtual group for people who don’t have local groups nearby.
I co-founded EA Russia and have been involved in community building for the last three years. I contributed to several EA organizations as a research intern, created a Youtube channel with EA-related videos, and studied the MIT Micromasters program on global health and development policy.
I’d be happy to chat about EA or introduce you to the EA Anywhere group:
Last year I’ve created a channel on effective altruism in Russian and made five videos on various topics, focusing mostly on introduction to main cause areas and fighting popular misconceptions on foreign aid (no English subtitles available, sorry). Each video was ~10 minutes long and they got >4000 views in total. With videos, I reached a 50 times larger audience than with offline public talks, but it was very time-consuming. I spent around 30-35 hours on making each video and eventually stopped making new ones, even though the audience was very friendly and people still reaching me out almost every week and asking about new videos. I’ll be happy to share my experience in making these videos if needed.
I think that creating a community space on YouTube and creating high-quality videos would be valuable, and I’ll be happy to hear if someone does this. But the conversion rate from YouTube viewers to actively involved EA members could be very low. That’s why in my videos I focused mostly on fighting ignorance, introducing ideas/books/research/organizations, and creating a better culture of charitable giving without actively promoting EA.
The show should respond to what viewers are interested in seeing content about rather than promoting a particular EA cause or philosophy.
Strongly agree with that, I think the show should introduce viewers to ideas & opportunities rather than promote a particular philosophy.
I’m very excited about organizing this event! You can find a sidenote on my personal experience with EAGxVitual in last year’s announcement. During the recent career conversations week it became even more clear to me how pivotal the EAGxVirtual 2020 was for my life and career. It helped me to find a mentor, with whom we ended up working for 6 months, and to identify the next steps to test my career fit in multiple areas—community building, research, and charity entrepreneurship. I never thought spending a weekend in front of a laptop could have such huge pay-offs, haha!
If you have any questions or suggestions, please, leave a message here or contact us at virtual@eaglobalx.org
Have you used any ads to promote these videos? For me as a viewer, it’s always suspicious to see a large number of views with very little engagement (for AI video: 1.1M views, 500 likes, 50 comments). I’d suggest relying more on organic growth in the future, it will give the videos more credibility in the eyes of viewers.
I think LPR can actually make a group more welcoming rather than unwelcoming if it’s located outside of EA hubs. Without LPR, career advice will be suitable only for a tiny amount of people who consider moving abroad where effective organizations are located. After research on local high-impact careers, there’ll be suitable advice at least for some people who doesn’t consider moving. A lot of people don’t want to live abroad because of family bonds/not enough career capital/language barriers, and it’s preferable for the community to have some thoughts on local impactful careers.
Thanks for your effort!
Thanks to EA GatherTown team for your efforts! It’s a great coworking space for remote teams. When we worked on EAGxVirtual last year it definitely helped us to sync faster and do more work. I also know many people outside of major EA hubs who are using the GT coworking space to stay accountable and productive. And because embedded pomodoro timers are synced you can have breaks at the same time and chat with others.
We’ve received lots of excited comments about EA GT in the EAGxVirtual ’22 feedback form, so we are looking into incorporating it even more this year as a virtual venue. Though some people were confused with the platform and asked for a better guidance/onboarding.
No, there is no cap. I definitely encourage you to apply! Based on previous EAGxVirtual events, we are expecting 1,000 − 1,500 participants.
I really like these themed events on the EA Forum and would love to see more of them! Thanks to everyone who contributes with posts, quick takes, and comments.
We scheduled related online discussions at EA Anywhere to facilitate knowledge-sharing and highlight useful career-related actions. Everyone is welcome to join!
Hi Manuel, we’ve been running a monthly book club at EA Anywhere for more than a year now. You can find the list of the books we read and discussion questions in this folder. I also really like this ranked list of EA-relevant books and often use it for inspiration.
But we host only one discussion per book which is different from, say, the 8-week The Precipice reading group or the 6-week WWOtF reading group curriculum.
We have a #study-buddy channel on EA Anywhere Slack designed specifically for finding collaborators, reading buddies, and accountability partners. It has >4000 members so it might be a good idea to post there as well.
I’m a big fan of Gapminder and their quizzes on global development. Good to see more content like that. I even scheduled an event at EA Anywhere based on your quiz. Thanks for putting it all together!
We’ve exchanged preliminary thoughts on EAGxVirtual with Lizka and agreed that it would be better to run a completely virtual conference instead of a hybrid next year. It will allow taking full advantage of the virtual format instead of mirroring the in-person conferences. EA Anywhere team would be happy to contribute to organizing this. We’re in touch with the CEA, but not ready to announce anything yet.