This is an account owned by CEA that gathers together posts written by the University Groups Team.
Uni Groups Team
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We just wanted to transparently share that CEA’s University Groups Team is not running two of our historical programs over the next few months:
A University Group Organizer Retreat (UGOR), which was usually run over (northern hemisphere) winter break
Our summer internship, usually run from May—September
We think both programs are relatively valuable, but are less aligned with our current vision (of providing value through helping EA university group organizers run better groups) than some of our alternatives.
We have made this (difficult!) decision so that we can instead focus on:
Running our Organizer Support Program, a three-week to semester-long mentorship program
Increasing capacity on the team (currently under 3 FTE), including by recruiting a strategy lead for our pilot university work (and building out that work more generally)
Potentially piloting new scalable programming
(And more)
This decision does not rule out running UGOR or our internship in the future. In fact, we are exploring whether we should run UGOR over (northern hemisphere) summer break, allowing more groups to better prepare for their academic year. We piloted such a retreat as part of our pilot university programming this summer, and that worked well.
We aim to continue to transparently share updates such as this one! We are also always open to feedback (including anonymously), especially if you have specific suggestions on what things we should deprioritize to create space for UGOR or the summer internship.
The Groups team did a 3 minute brainstorm about this during our weekly meeting! In no particular order:
Community Building
What (mass) (media) campaigns can encourage EA growth?
Uni with both AIS and EA group coexisting writes how that works
Experience of staying with others in your university group at an EAG(x)
What is EA CB strategy in light of AI progress
Mistakes you made as a university group organiser
When to stop investing in community building
A post that explores the lag time required for CB investments to pay off, applied both to cause-neutral EA and cause specific AIS
Other
Reasons for longer timelines
A good post on scope insensitivity that explains what it is (it doesn’t exist)
Overview of corporate campaigns—strengths and weaknesses
Updated post on ITN we can use in fellowships
Exploration on whether AI progress should cause us to value protests more (or in general what tactics should be considered)
Aggregation of Will MacAskill comments on EA in the age of AI
AIS early career recommendations for non-stem people
On being ineffective to be effective