Hello! As mentioned in an earlier comment, I run the UC Berkeley student group Effective Altruists of Berkeley. I was heavily influenced by this article and attempted to copy this club structure in the spring 2017 term. I've written about it in our retrospective, which you can read here:
To summarize, we had the following issues with this style:
We relied too heavily on weekly work meetings, to the detriment of independent work. If a member missed a work party then they would usually be stalled for a week
Not everyone had work for the full two hours
'Projects' in practice had to be managed by the president/VP, so the structure of a 'team leader' did not really help in practice.
I think this is because of the differences in the sizes of our groups (NTNU seems to be ~20, while we were 6-8) and the fact that NTNU had one large project they worked towards whereas we had several small ones. The extent to which a member understands what the task requires is, I think, the tipping point. Two projects that went quite well under this model were weekly meetings and a talk by the Center for Applied Rationality. Both of these were simple and had obvious steps (advertise, secure a venue, get snacks, pick the topic, and so on). Projects that didn't have such a clear sequence of steps (such as building a website) were less successful.
In conclusion, I would say that the organization structure in this article doesn't necessarily apply to every group. While it's certainly an inspiring model, organizers should think about the nature of the projects they want to pursue and how independent their working members can really be.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I and others at EA Berkeley are having difficulty trying to revamp our organizational structure. We will definitely implement some of these practices in the near future.
Hello! As mentioned in an earlier comment, I run the UC Berkeley student group Effective Altruists of Berkeley. I was heavily influenced by this article and attempted to copy this club structure in the spring 2017 term. I've written about it in our retrospective, which you can read here:
https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1DFtC4W1VcXDydR2vylJHMc20Wqn5dZsIi8oF3InjSrU/edit#bookmark=id.a5fy1m4xwj9j
To summarize, we had the following issues with this style:
I think this is because of the differences in the sizes of our groups (NTNU seems to be ~20, while we were 6-8) and the fact that NTNU had one large project they worked towards whereas we had several small ones. The extent to which a member understands what the task requires is, I think, the tipping point. Two projects that went quite well under this model were weekly meetings and a talk by the Center for Applied Rationality. Both of these were simple and had obvious steps (advertise, secure a venue, get snacks, pick the topic, and so on). Projects that didn't have such a clear sequence of steps (such as building a website) were less successful.
In conclusion, I would say that the organization structure in this article doesn't necessarily apply to every group. While it's certainly an inspiring model, organizers should think about the nature of the projects they want to pursue and how independent their working members can really be.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I and others at EA Berkeley are having difficulty trying to revamp our organizational structure. We will definitely implement some of these practices in the near future.