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thanks for easy fuzzies :)

Thank you for writing this, Aaron. I'd be much more excited about participating in a forum with this cultural norm :) <3

Suggestions for developing national-level effective altruism organizations

frankieaw5y1

Hey Jan - thanks for this piece.

"The hierarchical model is probably neither feasible nor desirable - central organizations such as CEA do not have the capacity to collect all relevant information, distill it, and provide detailed guidance.

The fully distributed model probably either requires too much overhead for all organizations or leads to only loose coordination.

What seems to be the most appropriate compromise is the model of a dedicated coordination facilitator. That is, someone, or some specific organization, facilitates coordination. This seem ... (read more)

Jan_Kulveit

Here by hierarchy I mean strictly tree-like flow of information, where the centre collects the inputs, decides, and sends commands. By fully distributed I mean "everybody talking to everybody" (fully connected network) or a random network (random pairs of orgs talking to each other).

EA community building grant: Lessons learned from working part-time on EA Denmark

frankieaw6y6

Hey Sebastian & Philip, thanks for this really helpful post. I'm currently helping to run Yale EA through a CEA Community Grant and there were some great tips here. There are a couple of thing's I'd be very interested to hear more about:

Would it be possible to see a copy of the survey which sought your members' "views on key bottlenecks and promising projects"?
If you'd be willing to share, what was the project you didn't end up doing after getting external advice on your prioritisation? Was it "to find and read resources (mainly blog

... (read more)

philip_porter

Hi Frankie! Happy to hear that Sebastian's post was of use to you. Great questions also! * Here is a draft of the member survey. There were a few minor changes when it went into survey form, but nothing major. * The project that was de-prioritised was a sort of Nordic add-on to 80,000 Hours' career advice. The idea was to identify career paths that seemed comparatively strong or weak in Nordic countries for those who aren't willing or able to relocate to the traditional EA hubs. We also wanted to give location-specific actionable advice on how to follow high-impact career paths in the Nordics. I still think this is a valuable project, but was convinced that focusing on making EA Denmark a more engaging and sustainable community was much more pressing, and so it seemed more valuable to work on first. * Our prioritisation sheet is probably not suitable for sharing in its current form. It's a mess not designed for other people to understand. As you mention, it's also very context specific. I've pasted an example project into another tab in the sheet Sebastian linked to, though. * Sure, here are slides for workshop 1, slides for workshop 2, and a collection of useful resources on the topics. Regarding whether it's possible to replicate: We did these workshops because they were reasonably low-hanging fruits for us. We're both very interested in the topics and have spent hundreds of hours of our personal time learning about them (Sebastian is even co-author of a book on effective learning and personal productivity). However, succesful workshops can probably be carried out with much less effort than that. In those cases, I think the most important things to focus on are, a) encouraging a "hypothesis -> test -> revise hypothesis" approach from the participants to how they want to improve, b) providing at least some inspiration/ideas for forming such hypotheses, and c) making the workshops interactive in the sense that participants form their hypotheses on site and comm

Review of CZEA "Intense EA Weekend" retreat

frankieaw6y4

Hey Jan, this is really great - thanks for writing it up! Do you have a doc you could share with the pub quiz questions you used?

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