I would like to thank Max Daniel, Jan Kulveit, Alex Barry, Ozzie Gooen, David Nash, Rose Hadshar, Harri Besceli, Emiel Riiko, Florent Berthet, Jaime Sevilla, Chi Nguyen and Aaron Gertler for reviewing this post. Special thanks to Vaidehi Agarwalla for her immense help with copyediting and research assistance. Also thank you to Wanyi Zeng who inspired my research project and has offered generous support since its inception.
This framework evolved out of research conducted as part of the 2019 CEA Summer Research Fellowship. My research project looks at how EA should be developed and approached in Asia. My research mentors were Rose Hadshar and Jan Kulveit. Please note that this post is not endorsed by the FHI, CEA, Open Phil, or other individuals and organizations interviewed as part of the research project.
If you would like to support my work, I am currently looking for funding, advisors and collaborators. You can reach me at [email protected].
If you are short on time, the Summary, Background and Summary Table sections should provide a sufficient overview of the framework.
Effective Altruism is growing globally. In Asia, for instance, the number of groups has doubled in the last 2 years [1]. Both group organizers and core EA decision-makers have voiced different views and concerns on how (or whether) this growth should happen. In order to avoid overlooking major risks and opportunities, improve communication, and prevent frustration across parties, how might we get everyone on the same page and have productive conversations about developing EA in an emerging location?
This framework attempts to answer that question. It aims to provide a common basis on which different stakeholders can evaluate the potential of EA development in emerging locations. It arose out of expert interviews with core EAs who are actively thinking about community and movement building strategy, including staff at CEA and Open Phil, community managers within other EA organizations, and leading group organizers around the world.
This post will first outline the reasons to work on this topic, the value of the framework, and its current status and limitations. Then it will present the framework in the form of a summary table before going in depth into each dimension. Finally, I outline my next steps in applying this framework to Asian locations.
In short, the framework applies two types of analyses: group analysis and geographic analysis, and considers two perspectives: cause-generic and cause-specific.
In the group analysis, the framework breaks down the question of “how promising is this group?” into three aspects:
In the geographic analysis, the framework breaks down the question “how exciting would EA be in this location?” into three aspects:
The analysis can be done from a cause-generic perspective and cause-specific [2] perspective.
The full framework has not yet been applied to specific locations and I expect to make adjustments based on feedback from group organizers and core EAs as it is applied and evaluated.
Throughout this post I will use the following terms which need some justification or clarification:
I was driven to create this framework after noticing communication gaps between core EA decision-makers and local organizers in Asia. While the framework is location-agnostic, the following account describes the specific experiences that motivated me to conduct this research on Asia, and led to the development of this framework. In providing this contextual information, it is not my intent to lay blame to actors on either side, especially given that peoples’ actions are often more reasonable and justified once you understand the conditions they’re operating under. However, I do want to give readers a clear picture of the situation I observed, to illustrate why I thought this was an important and urgent problem.
This project started from a conversation with an Asian organizer who had been working on EA in their country for several years. They mentioned confusion and frustration in coordinating with †core EA decision-makers around funding and strategy planning. For example, they had difficulties securing funding, mentioning that they had applied and were rejected for both a community building and non-community building grant, and were unable to get feedback on these grants until meeting with an evaluator at an EA event overseas. They also said, “We operate independently but we have concerns to be at risk of not being aligned with CEA/EA globally. In general, people obey a head office’s rules and instructions because they are directly under the charge of the HQ. But it’s funny that EA chapters also feel this way when we are neither funded nor given concrete support.”
At roughly the same time, I became involved in community calls with EA organizers across Asia. To my surprise, there were many more organizers than I expected, including multiple people from Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, and India. The EA group survey showed that the number of EA groups has doubled in Asia in the last two years. Additionally, there were a growing number of EA-relevant actors in Asia in both EA and EA-adjacent organizations, as well as donors.
On these calls and subsequent one-on-one conversations with key members of the EA Asia community, I noticed that others were uncertain about how to coordinate with core EAs and plan strategy in their local locations. Some organizers had almost no contact with core EAs, while others pointed to specific issues they’d had in the past, like difficulties with grant logistics. Some members of the community felt it was unclear what types of support are accessible for Asia group organizers, while others had the impression that core decision-makers thought non-China Asian countries were “not worth their time”.
This is exacerbated by the lack of systematic and comprehensive investigation into the risks and opportunities of further EA development in Asia. The existing EA literature on this is generic and primarily focused on risk (e.g. fidelity model of spreading ideas, why not to rush translation). Conducting in-depth investigation into the potential of emerging locations does not fall clearly under the remit of any existing EA organizations, and leading meta organizations are already time- and capacity-constrained.
At this point, I started to feel worried about the default trajectory of EA in Asia. Having spent much more time engaging with core EAs, including decision-makers, than most Asian organizers, I felt there were important gaps in communication, understanding, and expectations that needed to be filled. It seemed that if things stayed the same, there would be ever increasing confusion, frustration, and even antagonism amongst a growing number of Asian organizers. This could also lead to misalignment, fragmentation, unilateralism, or the misallocation of resources. It could also damage the reputation of EA, and the movement could miss out on large opportunities to do good. My hope is that this framework can help to bridge some of the communication gaps and improve the trajectory of EA development in Asia.
What is creating confusion and frustration for EA Asia organizers? Based on my interviews of Asia organizers, I have found several possible bottlenecks.
At a high-level, core EA community often use terms to describe people, groups, and even locations, that are not explicitly defined. The terms “promising” or “exciting” are often used to describe people and projects. New members to the EA community may also be assessed on how “aligned” they are. In one of my interviews, one Asian organizer was confused about this and specifically asked: “Are we ‘EA enough’?”. It seems challenging for local organizers with infrequent interactions with the core to understand the implicit meaning of terms that may be commonly used in evaluative contexts.
On an organizational level, CEA has published their model for evaluating grant applications where they concretely state three equally-weighted evaluation criteria:
These criteria are still confusing for local organizers: how do they demonstrate whether they fulfill these criteria? For example, one decision-maker mentioned that one of the ways they assess someone’s understanding of EA (part of Criteria #2) is by looking at the connections that the person has within the EA core community, and the core community’s impressions of the person. While the use of proxies such as connections and impressions for assessment may be common knowledge within the core community, group organizers with limited interactions often do not have access to this implicit information. These types of implicit information are often communicated through in-person conversations.
While group organizers know what criteria are being assessed, they don’t understand how to demonstrate their fulfilment of the criteria. It is possible that they might develop a sound development strategy, but fail to communicate critical information in their funding proposals. This, combined with a historically constrained capacity of decision-makers to provide frequent communication with and feedback to remote group organizers, may exacerbate confusion and frustration.
Given the above, organizers, especially in locations that are very different from established EA communities, find it particularly challenging to figure out their strategy with existing EA group resources. Some of the questions they found challenging to answer include:
This also seems to create a negative feedback loop; since organizers don’t know what information to collect to inform their strategy, evaluators feel that there is insufficient information to make decisions, and try to reduce risk by discouraging additional action in the organizer’s location and in turn reducing additional efforts to gather more information that could improve decision-making in the location.
Finally, all of the above effects may be further exacerbated by the current way of transferring existing models. This was described by one organizer: “Major decisions regarding the ‘latest directions’ of EA movement [are] not well communicated to [group organizers]. How do [we] get the most up-to-date thinking and concerns with a human instead of via checking in on a forum post which might be missed, so that we are keeping our alignment with the movement as a whole and to also have a reliable channel to provide feedback?”.
Models often require many hours of discussion for a high-fidelity transfer, which is particularly challenging for organizers living far from EA hubs, who may not have the ability (due to personal circumstances or finances) to frequently travel and attend EA events and conferences like EA Globals.
This framework aims to address current bottlenecks by providing local group organizers with a specific list of considerations that core EA evaluators may use when assessing the potential and importance of their group and geography. Hence, this framework is primarily designed for group organizers. However, I believe the framework also benefits evaluators and, ultimately, the EA community overall.
I consider this framework to be in its minimally viable state. I expect potentially significant updates as it is used by group organizers and decision-makers. This has happened twice during this post’s review process.
Perhaps the most important caveat to include is that, while I believe in the importance of alignment and coordination, I am not saying, via this framework, that local organizers should expect or rely on core EAs to provide guidance in the development of their local strategies. Given general conditions of uncertainty (possibly cluelessness) and capacity constraints, I think the onus is on local organizers to independently develop a thorough map of their group and geography, develop a strategy based on this understanding, and educate core EAs on the map and explain how this leads to the associated strategy.
The framework supports this process by:
Beyond this, I have identified several other limitations of the framework in its current iteration, in the form of questions it has yet to answer:
In terms of the scale of application, I believe the framework can be used to produce valuable information on the national, city or student-group level. This framework is likely less valuable at larger scales, say sub-regions like Southeast Asia or across entire continents like Asia. That said, it’s possible that as local analyses are aggregated, we could identify common themes that could be acted upon at a larger scale.
My intent was not to produce a complete new model or radically change existing ones; I wanted to aggregate and clarify key considerations in evaluation that already exist in the minds of decision-makers. Hence, my primary methodology was conducting expert interviews with core EAs and local organizers. I supplemented this with EA literature review and testing the application of existing business frameworks related to market entry.
I conducted 21 interviews (ranging between 30-90 minutes, some included follow-up conversations in-person and via email) with decision-makers, including people working at meta orgs (e.g. CEA and Open Phil), community managers at EA organizations (e.g. CFAR), group organizers in established locations (e.g. Czechia, Geneva, Stanford), and group organizers in Asia (Singapore, India, Philippines).
I mainly employed a user interview technique commonly used in startup product development, which favours asking open-ended, non-leading questions, which allows interviewees to express thoughts without interruption and interviewers to follow their curiosity based on interviewee responses rather than fixed scripts. As mentioned, the guiding direction was determining which questions, if answered, would inform or change this person’s view on what we should do in an Asian country.
Given that we are looking at developing EA in “new markets”, I thought it might be appropriate to look at leading business frameworks used for doing market entry analysis. While none was a great fit, I drew some inspiration from the following:
Some early reviewers asked why I did not use the Importance, Neglectedness, and Tractability (INT) framework. While INT is not at odds with the framework I have created, it is not particularly useful in probing the depth of analysis required for the evaluation. As one organizer put it: “[the framework described in this post] naturally leads to an inside view of a location. That is, applying your framework gets me closer to developing [a] strategic plan suited to a particular location, while the INT just gives me an outside view that is hard to act upon”. Further, the INT does not accurately capture the way evaluators currently assess locations.
I supplemented interviewee responses and my understanding with EA literature about the theories and application of community and movement building, including:
This framework attempts to consolidate all possible considerations decision-makers may use when evaluating groups and locations. Note that the specific weighting given to each consideration will vary across decision-makers; some may not matter at all, while others may only matter up to a certain threshold (as more of a pass/fail indicator).
Note that the following list is far from exhaustive. I attempt to provide more specificity and make considerations more tangible using examples, but it’s highly likely that I have not covered all relevant types of examples. Further work needs to be done to improve comprehensiveness (see Next Steps section for details).
This section includes the group traction, organizer capabilities, and community connections.Information from group analysis may also inform non-grant related decisions, e.g. how and where to allocate community health resources or non-monetary group support.
During the review process there was some confusion as to why this category was valuable, so I have included a rationale behind this section here. Community connections are useful for both group organizers and decision makers. For group organizers it will help them evaluate their own connectedness and how this might inhibit their potential. For decision makers it helps them identify ways they can help organizers and tailor resources to them and understand group differences across regions to correctly determine the reasons for a group’s potential or lack thereof. Finally, resources like funding, talent, networks, shared culture are not interchangeable and require different solutions to fix (i.e. providing funding will not necessarily improve a network bottleneck).
The geographic analysis looks at the local existing alignment, talent, and business and politics.
Both cause-generic and cause-specific perspectives can be applied to these considerations.
Both cause-generic and specific lenses can be applied to these considerations.
Specific considerations for international talent routing:
To reiterate, I developed this framework to help improve communication and coordination between core EAs and group organizers in Asia. The next step is putting the framework into practice and testing its useability with organizers and evaluators. Here are some ways I plan to go about this:
If you are interested in supporting and/or funding this work, please get in touch with me at [email protected].
1: From EA Groups 2019 Survey Data (accessed by request, data has not yet been published)
2: Most questions from the “Cause specific” perspective are specific versions of the General EA perspective questions. One major exception is in the Business & Politics dimension. Further work should be done to identify cause-specific questions as these may differ greatly from cause to cause.
3: During the review process of this post, there were also disagreements from local organizers around the world (beyond Asia) about the right metrics to use to evaluate groups. This seems like an important topic for further investigation, but falls outside the scope of this current post.
As an FYI, I doubt the source for [1] is reliable, and it may be that there were more groups earlier than 2 years ago than now... groups have been forming and shutting down with some regularity.
Please be very, very careful with this. I claim EA has made many significant mistakes as its Western-based members have tried to engage with other cultures. It's not easy to do well.
Hey, thanks for pointing these things out.
Re survey data, I think David Moss (or someone else from Rethink or CEA, who were involved in running the the EA Groups survey), would be better placed to respond to this. I have, however, consulted with organizers in India and the Philippines about this, and the trend seems roughly in line with their impressions.
I agree that this isn’t easy work and needs to be approached with caution. Being from and based in Asia, I myself have seen and heard (and read) about several suboptimal experiences as EAs from Asia try to coordinate with those in the West. As such, my proposed next steps were focussed on working with Asian organizers to develop a more thorough understanding of local contexts while helping to support stronger communication between Asian actors and core EAs. Toward this end, I’m actively trying to build an advisory board that gives input from multiple perspectives, balancing views from key Asian actors (including organizers, donors, cause area experts) with core EA orgs and experienced group organizers in the rest of the world.
That said, I would be curious to hear more about the mistakes that you have observed, as this could inform a better approach to further research.