On the Forum side, I think of the Forum Prize as a small effort in this direction (highlighting posts that are written clearly and do good epistemic things, holding them up as models to emulate). 

AMAs and general solicitation of expert content are also part of this — bringing good thinkers and knowledgeable people to the Forum, and exposing readers to their knowledge and habits of mind.

I agree with a lot of Amy/Julia's impressions. Some other thoughts:

7 years ago (I was an intern over the summer, so I'm probably missing some things). I think "CEA" was really just a legal entity for a wide variety of other projects. There was a bit more research being done in-house (e.g Global Priorities Project), and I think basically everything was happening in Oxford. 

Compared to then: more cohesive, less research, people more distributed across the world.

5 years ago: things were beginning to get a bit more integrated. Different teams were coming together and trying to figure out what the internal culture was. I think CEA was also really figuring out what to focus on: there were research projects, projects promoting effective giving, EA community building etc. 

Compared to then: Narrower focus and more established/consistent team culture.

2 years ago: I think there was a lot of uncertainty: we were searching for new leadership, and didn't have a solid long-term strategy. However, I think we were beginning to integrate a bunch of cool hires that we made in 2018, and we had a supportive culture. We were focused on making sure we followed through on existing commitments (rather than ambitious goals/new things). We had an office in Berkeley as well as in Oxford.

Compared to then: Clearer goals/leadership, more focus on expansion, no Berkeley office and more focus on remote work.

I think I listed mostly good or neutral things. When I reflect on what I miss from previous eras, the main thing is the in-person office culture (though I hope we'll get this back as we move into our new Oxford office).

I’ll answer from an events perspective:

I think we could be doing a lot more to support community building using events! This is one reason I’m so excited about the two roles I posted for my team.

In particular, I’m always inspired by how well EAGx teams do. We provide them a bit of support, mentorship, and money and they create events that can be quite impactful. One of the events roles we posted, the Community Events Manager, is meant to take this to the next level by supporting a portfolio of community run events (which could include a wide range of events formats!). We have seen community members take initiative to run things on their own with very little money and support and this feels awesome and like a shame. I’m impressed with what folks have been able to do on there own, but it seems like we are leaving value on the table by not helping community run events more. I’m hopeful that we will find someone who can fix that!

I also think our internal events could do more with the right person, which is why we posted a pretty broad second job of Events Generalist. I think I’ve fallen down by not doing as much as impact analysis on events as I could. In my perfect world I would add someone to the team who could help me with that. But even adding another team member who could help run targeted retreats or scale up our mentorship around events or a variety of other things would mean we could invest more in the community. I’m hopeful that we will find someone who can help us do that!

I sometimes speak to people who aren't aware how many career paths in community building there are, even outside of EA. I do think this causes there to be fewer community builders than there "should" be.

It feels hard to make really broad statements though; some people's skills and interests are pretty clearly not a fit for community building, and I don't think they should try to force it.

(Sharing impressions, there's no well-developed theory here)

Intuitively, I'd say somewhere between "too low" and "adequate". 

I'm not very involved in groups work, so my knowledge on that side is limited, but I don't have the impression that lots of potentially awesome group leaders aren't fulfilling their potential — nothing like that. But I do think that many people who don't see themselves as "community building" types should consider how they can contribute in small ways:

• Being one more friendly/experienced face at a local event
• Giving helpful advice to someone outside of EA who's trying to make some relevant life decision (even via something as simple as "try GiveWell, they have great stuff" or "the 80,000 Hours career tool might be helpful")
• Sharing a quick Facebook post about their next donation, to make more of their social network aware of the general idea of "effective giving" (and to catch any of those people who might be in the very real category of "hears about EA, instantly sold")

These are all very generic ideas, but depending on other things about someone (language fluency, membership in other communities, personal network), there may be other smallish things they can do. It would be interesting to see everyone past a certain level of EA familiarity (e.g. has done a fellowship or read multiple books) spend 15 minutes asking themselves "how can I do one small thing to grow the community?"

Positives:

• I work with really excellent people (both at CEA, and the various people I meet through my Forum/content work).
• Good management policy — I feel guided, encouraged, and constantly pushed to do better, but not in a draining or net-negative stressful way.
• Lots of ways to do the job — many projects could be a good fit for my goals, there's a constant flow of new options and ideas I can try to implement.

Negatives:

• Lots of ways to do the job (the dark side) — I'm aware that some optimal version of me could probably have 10x the impact in exactly this role, and it's difficult to find enough time and focus to move closer to being that person. I'm acutely aware of the skills I lack, and the way my personal preferences can push me towards work I enjoy rather than work I expect to have the best possible long-term impact.
• The sense of being a "public face" — no matter how many epistemic statuses I employ, it's still easy for my personal views to be taken as CEA's (or the community's in general, when I write things for public consumption).
• The level of meta I often work at — it's easy to lose contact with the purpose of my job, and my love for EA, when I'm spending most of my time copyediting or testing Mailchimp formatting or counting engagement hours, rather than feeling directly responsible for any specific person being helped (or any useful longtermist initiative being launched, etc.)

I love my job, and feel very lucky.

Positives:

• I genuinely like and trust my colleagues. I really enjoy working with people who care about very similar things and are deeply into the same ideas/culture. I've learned a lot from them.
• Being able to (somewhat) shape the role to what I enjoy and am good at (e.g. I hate public speaking but love writing - others at CEA are the opposite, so I can write speeches for them). This is something that we try to do for everyone at CEA: to find a role that really plays to their strengths.
• Facing a lot of open-ended and challenging projects, and having feedback (either from colleagues, stakeholders, or reality) on them. I think this is a great way to learn (and again, I think this is maybe pretty common at CEA).
• When I feel like we're making progress, it's amazing. It's so good to invest deeply in something and see it pay off.

Negatives: (I think this basically boils down to "when it goes wrong, it's stressful")

• The flip side of shaping the role around me is that I can't always shape the role to my interests and personal likes! I gave a talk at the EA Coordination Forum and that really stressed me out (I think probably it was a mistake to give the talk).
• The flip side of the progress is that I feel pretty bad when we mess up or I fail at some project I've been working on.
• The flip side of the open-endedness is that it's often unclear whether I'm doing the right thing. I spend a lot of time reflecting on this sort of thing. It's a bit stressful.

Positives:

• I feel like I was able to create a role that played to my strengths, and I feel excited about the expected value of my career.
• I care a lot about my work.
• I really like my colleagues.

Negatives:

• It can be stressful. I feel like I'm working on important things, and care a lot about how they go. When things don't go well or there's something time-sensitive and important to get right, it can feel stressful. This might be particularly related to my role (I handle risky situations a lot).
• It can be hard to take my brain off of work. I'm a lot better than I used to be, but it's a concerted effort I have to make. (e.g. my partner will remind me not to look at my work computer, I've uninstalled my work slack from my phone)

For me it might be two sides of the same coin (particular to my role on the community health team).

The positive is getting to serve a community I really believe in, and supporting people who feel very much on the same team as me as far as big life goals.

The negative is that there's less separation between work life and community life than there would be in a lot of jobs. I'm not a normal community member in the way I was before I worked here - there are more things I have to try to be neutral on, etc. Facebook is mostly a work space for me.

Positive: The people I work with, both at CEA as well as the wider EA community, are often impressive, talented, and kind.

Negative: I'm not a morning person, and living in Pacific time while working with Brits means I have to be up early a lot

I love my job a lot. I think the biggest positive for me is hearing impact stories from the events where people get some amazing connection or opportunity as a result of attending. From a pure enjoyment standpoint I am a sucker for the feeling when an event starts and I get to see all of the excited EAs who have come to attend this thing that my team worked so hard to make for them. There are moments when people start streaming in and it is so busy with activity during registration and everyone looks so happy... it feels like when you buy someone a present that you know they will like and you get to watch them open it!

I used to find the criticism from the community to be a bit hard, but now I have a much thicker skin and better relationship with the feedback. I think part of that comes from having more time, so that if we get negative feedback about something it is a data point about something where we made a decision to do one way or the other. I still feel stress when I think I underperform on something because the stakes feel so high.

In the past I traveled quite a bit for work. At the time that was a positive for me. I’m not sure if it will be as much of a positive now that I have two kids. We will see pretty soon!

I think this varies based on the team. My team (Events) is very strong on Alliance Mentality and Purpose First. I think we could improve on Perpetual Beta, which is why we are emphasizing skills related to impact analysis and program evaluation in our current hiring round. 

Good question! Unfortunately I don't have an amazing answer. I think the values are a bit of a mix between simply reflecting where we currently are, and where we'd like to go. Overall, it feels like we're maybe 60-80% towards the ideal on these dimensions. So they are genuine strengths, but I think there's still room for us to grow in the dimension. There isn't one that stands out as more already-achieved, or as  more in need for improvement: they're all in that ~60-80% range.