Quickly:
> I agree with the approach's direction, but this premise doesn't seem very helpful in shaping the debate.

Sorry, I don't understand this. What is "the debate" that you are referring to? 

I just meant the discussion you wanted to see; I probably used the wrong synonym.

This is good to know. While mentioning MCF, I would bring up that it seems bad to me that MCF seems to be very much within the OP umbrella, as I understand it. I believe that it was funded by OP or CEA, and the people who set it up were employed by CEA, which was primarily funded by OP. Most of the attendees seem like people at OP or CEA, or else heavily funded by OP. 

I generally believe that EA is effective at being pragmatic, and in that regard, I think it's important for the key organizations that are both giving and receiving funding in this area to coordinate, especially with topics like funding diversification. I agree that this is not the ideal world, but this goes back to the main topic.

I want to see more discussion on how EA can better diversify and have strategically-chosen distance from OP/GV.

One reason is that it seems like multiple people at OP/GV have basically said that they want this (or at least, many of the key aspects of this). 

I agree with the approach's direction, but this premise doesn't seem very helpful in shaping the debate. It doesn't seem that there is a right level of funding for meta EA or that this is what we currently have. 

My perception is that OP has specific goals, one of which is to reduce GCR risk. As there are not so many high absorbency funding opportunities and a lot of uncertainty in the field, they focus more on capacity building, of which EA has proven to be a solid investment in talent pipeline building.

If this is true, then the level of funding we are currently seeing is downstream from OP's overall yearly spending and their goals. Other funders will come to very different conclusions as to why they would want to fund EA meta and to what extent.

If you're a meta funder who agrees with GCR risks, you might see opportunities that either don't want OPs' money, that OP doesn't want to fund, or that want to keep OPs' funding under a certain bar. These are more neglected, but they are more cost-effective for you as they are not as fungible.

At the last, MCF funding diversification and the EA brand were the two main topics, but to me, meta-funding diversification seems much harder, especially for areas under the EA brand.

As someone who heard from EA at age 40 and is now 50, this question comes up often in discussions with more experienced professionals. I wrote about my personal journey, which I couldn't have done without the luxury of much free time to learn and explore in this space. A recent post by Jim Chapman also describes the effort that can be needed to transition into the space.

In my local group, I'm mostly the oldest participant, as many other people my age don't feel very welcome in a group of younger people. They mostly also see donations as their pathway to contributing, which doesn't require the level of involvement in the community that people with career ambitions have. The group is simply less useful in an instrumental way; the same applies to EA conferences.

In organizations, the hiring process can sometimes be more focused on younger candidates. Some organizations prioritize a strong alignment of values, which involves cultivating hard-to-fake signals such as investing in networking, volunteering, attending conferences and retreats, and making a pledge that may present a significant challenge for individuals with family responsibilities. 

The first time I applied for jobs was in my late 40s in EA organizations, as I was previously accustomed to networking and receiving invitations for work opportunities. Completing work trials under time pressure often seemed tailored to those with more fluid intelligence, which is typically higher in younger individuals, as opposed to the crystallized intelligence that develops later in life. 

Sometimes, experienced professionals will vent how they were invited to a job and then had to start at the first stage, how they were treated unprofessionally in the hiring process, or even when they start how their expertise is not valued in an organization led by people with little prior leadership experience. This can lead to losing out on more experienced people. (At Successif, we help mid-career and more senior people navigate these challenges in the area of AI risk).

This leads me to the question if EA is the right place for more senior people. When I talk to people my age about impact, I'm more likely to recommend the donation opportunities at Effektiv Spenden, the 10% Pledge, or the book Moral Ambition for career inspiration than the global or national EA websites. While I often enjoy being the oldest person and spending much time in deep discussions with philosophically minded people 20 years my junior, I expect this to be the exception. People with families and busy jobs are probably looking for a quick way to shift their focus and connect to people. at a similar point in their life Other services and brands are probably now better suited to cater to this need than EA.

This seems directionally correct, but I would add more nuance.

While OP, as a grantmaker, has a goal it wants to achieve with its grants (and they wouldn't be EA aligned if they didn't), this doesn't necessarily mean they are very short term. The Open Phil EA/LT Survey seems to me to show best what they care about in outcomes (talent working in impactful areas) but also how hard it is to pinpoint the actions and inputs needed. This leads me to believe that OP instrumentally cares about the community/ecosystem/network as it needs multiple touchpoints and interactions to get most people from being interested in EA ideas to working on impactful things.

On the other side, we use the term community in confusing ways. I was on a Community Builder Grant by CEA for two years when working at EA Germany, which many call national community building. What we were actually doing was working on the talent development pipeline, trying to find promising target groups, developing them and trying to estimate the talent outcomes. 

Working on EA as a social movement/community while being paid is challenging. On one hand, I assume OP would find it instrumentally useful (see above) but still desire to track short-term outcomes as a grantmaker. As a grant recipient, I felt I couldn't justify any actions that lacked a clear connection between outcomes and impact. Hosting closed events for engaged individuals in my local community, mentoring, having one-on-ones with less experienced people, or renting a local space for coworking and group events appeared harder to measure. I also believe in the norm of doing this out of care, wanting to give back to the community, and ensuring the community is a place where people don't need to be compensated to participate.

The fellowships you mention want to have impact-focused people working in mainly nonimpact-focused organizations or starting new ones. The MCF question was about people working within the movement. Communications is also a broad field, with a strategist having different skill requirements than someone working in PR or also in digital marketing. So, I'm not sure if the comparison works.

That said, I could see a version of this where experienced people from different communications backgrounds get introduced to EA ideas to be better prepared for applying to organizations within the field. At Successif, we have some experienced communication people in our advising program whom we help to navigate the AI Risk field and get introduced to ideas and organizations. We're also planning an advocacy fellowship based on our existing media course. Perhaps something like this could also be useful in the EA space. I'm happy to share our experiences if anyone wants to work on this.

Thanks for recommending Successif! Our homepage might be a better starting point as it has more information on our focus on helping people reduce AI risk. That being said, the profile of the OP fits our program very well, and we would be glad to get an application.

I would have preferred working groups especially for the questions around monetary value of talent which seemed especially hard to get a sense for.

I had a similar sense of feeling underprepared and rushed while taking the survey and think my input would have been better with more time and a different setting. At the same time I can see that it could have been hard to get the same group of people to answer without these constraints.

For the monetary value of talent I‘m especially cautious on putting much weight on them as I haven’t seen much discussion on such estimates and coming up with a numbers in minutes is hard.

Rather than accepting the numbers at face value, they may be more useful for illustrating directional thinking at a specific moment in time.

None of the organizations are mentioned in the book, except for a footnote about GWWC. However, Rob Mather and AMF get a whole chapter, which includes fundraising for bednets.

€30,000 to The Humane League via Effektiv Spenden (my company set up a campaign page: https://effektiv-spenden.org/knitters-for-animals