When I reflect back on my experiences at South Bay EA, the one thing that would save us so much time (that we can then use for non-scalable activities like 1:1s) is if we had high quality pre-made discussion sheets.
(To be clear, this is still an ongoing problem).
It takes us ~3-12 hours to make a typical discussion sheet for one meetup.
Naively, it would be really helpful if CEA or a crowdsourced group (eg, this forum) worked on creating high-quality discussion sheets that would save us 90% of the effort.
I could imagine other content being helpful as well, for example ("intro to EA" emails), event descriptions etc (though some of them are material you can easily crib from other EA groups listed on meetup.com and Facebook).
Reasons against this being particularly useful:
1. Heterogeneity of EA groups's needs: It might just be really hard to prepare useful sheets for an "EA local group (or university group)" in the abstract, since different local groups differ so much in knowledge of EA, demographic composition, schedules, timing preferences etc.
Ex. In South Bay, I've used examples from tech to illustrate cognitive biases in our instrumental rationality discussions (I think this is reasonable since ~100% of people who come to our EA events in Silicon Valley have a passing familiarity with tech). We also try to cater to people who have moderate familiarity and interest in EA, rather than try to "hard sell" EA to an unsympathetic audience, or be very useful to professional EAs (the latter because professional EAs rarely attend, rather than as a deliberate choice).
There's also a related problem where trying to serve an EA audience in the abstract might end up being just worse than local groups creating their own sheets and sharing knowledge, since there's more feedback from reality in the latter version.
2. The process of doing content creation is actually really good/necessary to develop organizer's understanding. I definitely learned a lot from making sheets/event introductions, especially in fields I had little prior knowledge in (eg, population ethics, moral uncertainty, systematized creativity). If we had pre-made sheets, maybe we'll have horrible illusions of transparency, and the organizers will convey a lot of wrong information about the topic or EA to our members.
3. Adoption concerns Even if {CEA, this forum} do end up creating material that's better than what 99% of groups can make for ourselves + save them 50-80% of the effort, it might still not be adopted and waste a lot of time.
Thanks Linch for this question. This is half an answer and half a comment! Many group leaders have expressed the need for high quality resources for events, so I think YES this is a very good idea. Some of the reasons against providing these resources can be reduced by having good supporting material such as suggestions for group organisers on how they could modify the resource to fit their group, suggested readings for group organisers, explanations of who this resource would be useful for, and more frequent sharing of resources!
I've been coordinating the EA Hub Resources over the last few months. We are still in the early stages of compiling events resources, so our team hopes to continue to use the Hub to compile more resources from group leaders around the world, and have the hub as the main repository for group resources. And we'd love your help, and the help of many other group organisers!
The current aim is to put on resources that 1) have enough supporting information for group organisers to work out how to use the resource 2) have been successfully used by at least one group, to improve quality but also to ensure this resource is something that at least some groups would want to use, and 3) aren't too similar to other resources so there isn't too much content to wade through, and 4) completely modifiable. So as a result we aren't having people put resources directly onto the Hub. Instead they can suggest changes to the Hub Resources pages on the google drive here, submit resources on this google drive, or just give me an email on catherine@eahub.org. We also have a team on slack you can join if you want to help review and compile resources!
(Catherine, feel free to correct this) I think as of now, we don't really need much new material, since we the resources we have up and things that will be done soon cover most of the commonly used/standard events (discussion syllabi, intro presentations etc.) and considerations (i.e. community health or managing group dynamics).
We definitely spend most of our time compiling material, but I wouldn't say that compiling is much less time intensive than creating new material from scratch. Compiling can take quite a while, because you still need to determine a good structure, need to incorporate conflicting advice, and often contextualise the advice.