Thanks for the thorough write-up! I’m glad to see this initiative taking shape. As we’ve briefly discussed earlier this year, I believe there are some low-hanging fruits to pluck with respect to community management in Germany, especially after we at EAF have deprioritised community building and local group support.
From the list of planned activities you describe, I am most excited about facilitating retreats, providing some support for new groups, and aiming to become a tax-exempt association to facilitate financial management. In general, facilitating coordination and exchange among local groups has often seemed valuable to me in the past.
At the same time, I’d caution against providing too many services too soon. My skepticism is grounded mainly in my experience that local groups often don’t use tools offered to them—like a CRM or a website—reliably. This is in part because turnover is usually high and non-essential things often don’t get handed over, and in part because motivation and available time tends to fluctuate strongly. (On a side note: This may be hard, but ideally such effects are also taken into account when surveying groups about their needs.) I’ve often seen groups drop things after an initial burst of motivation and interest. This can have negative effects if they would counterfactually have focused more on more key aspects of local group management.
For these reasons I’d recommend using an iterative approach, focusing initially on the provision of fairly basic infrastructure and a small number of key events. If this goes well and you have more capacitiy and notice more demand, you can expand your activities step-by-step.
With respect to the idea of an introductory workshop series, and perhaps also relevant to other planned activities: I’ve become less optimistic about proactive outreach efforts by local groups since I wrote down my toughts on running a local group a little over a year ago (link). In particular, I probably wouldn’t endorse several of the recommendations I made in the ‘Outreach’ section anymore, as well as the idea of running an ‘EA seminar’ for new members. With respect to the seminar/workshop series, I’ve become less sure about the value of efforts trying to “teach” EA ideas to potentially interested people. People who are a good fit for a group in the long run are often those who also have sufficient motivation to read about and engage with relevant ideas on their own. I’m not highly confident in this, though, and people who have themselves run such seminars are be in a better position to evaluate their value.
EAF deprioritised community building to focus more on its core priority: research on preventing s-risks from AI. Last year seemed to be a good time to hand over community building as CEA had recently increased its capacity in this area (with the community building grants, and additions to the groups team). EAF is still hosting a resource overview on the non-EAF-specific German EA landing page, though perhaps this can be transfered ot a GEAN website at some point.
You can read more about our EAF’s plans for 2019 in this post.