Hello all! I'm trying to ascertain demand for a new EA organisation in central London before I apply for funding.
I'm calling it EAL (Effective Altruism Laboratory) for now, until I think of a sufficiently punny acronym.
The hope is to create a workspace for independent researchers to enjoy the benefits of... not being independent. Think serendipitous conversation, discussion, collaboration, mentorship, a small community of smart, passionate, ambitious individuals exercising their intellectual autonomy and doing world class research - with free food.
I think membership could be automatically offered to London-based EA research grant recipients, with other researchers, professionals and academics in EA and closely related fields also able to apply for access.
If you are a London-based researcher and/or would like to be considered for membership if EAL happens, please help me by filling in a short form:
We (Charity Entrepreneurship) have considered doing something like this. Would love to see the results and to know what locations you are considering. We are in west London.
I suggest that this location (if it existed) would be a good place to hold weekly EA meetups. I lived somewhere which did a weekly free networking meal and it was a great place to bring professional connections. If EA global is a good thing to spend money on, I suggest the same is true of regular, high quality networking events.
More info: I lived at Newspeak House for a year. They run a weekly free meal called ration club, attended by policy and tech people. It is an attractive space and a good crowd and often allowed me to make professional connections "Hey i know this place that holds weekly meals, you want to come". This seems underrated to me.
Would you consider extending this to EA researchers who work remotely for an organization, especially for organizations without an office at all?
I feel like if they do this we should probably pay them right? Since otherwise we risk doublecounting impact.
To avoid double counting impact, how much would we have to pay? The difference in value between independent research and remote research for an org, both without an office? It might be tricky to get this right, so even if you did do this, you might still want to consider remote employees and independent researchers separately before aggregating their impacts. And if you know what price to set and who would pay, you can just subtract it from the impact without actually charging it.
I do think it's fairer if remote employees pay (more) than independent researchers, since the extra value produced by them from working in the office could be lower, it will improve their research ability and knowledge less (less EA human capital growth), they're in less precarious positions, and the organizations could pay for office spaces themselves, although working at an org may mean they're better vetted as researchers, depending on the organization, so a smaller percentage increase in productivity could still have a larger absolute difference.
Sounds promising. You might want to ask Lightcone and Redwood, who've shared their offices, about their experiences, as well as EA Berlin, and (I think) Washington DC EA.
Hey Jessica, great to hear about this! I was thinking about doing something similar. Would you consider involving non-researchers working at EA-orgs remotely? I’ve spoken to a few interested people with this profile.
Ooh, I love this idea. Thanks for the initiative!
Hi Jessica - just wondering if this idea got up off the ground?
We have an EA co-working space in Berlin and it is really a value add. Many different orgs come together, exchange ideas and socialize. Check out this post if you haven't seen it already: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NnrHvJALEKH4Ykzyt/introducing-teamwork-an-ea-coworking-space-in-berlin
Happy to put you in touch with the organizer.