All of tobiaspulver's Comments + Replies

EAF deprioritised community building to focus more on its core priority: research on preventing s-risks from AI. Last year seemed to be a good time to hand over community building as CEA had recently increased its capacity in this area (with the community building grants, and additions to the groups team). EAF is still hosting a resource overview on the non-EAF-specific German EA landing page, though perhaps this can be transfered ot a GEAN website at some point.

You can read more about our EAF's plans for 2019 in this post.

Thanks for the thorough write-up! I'm glad to see this initiative taking shape. As we've briefly discussed earlier this year, I believe there are some low-hanging fruits to pluck with respect to community management in Germany, especially after we at EAF have deprioritised community building and local group support.

From the list of planned activities you describe, I am most excited about facilitating retreats, providing some support for new groups, and aiming to become a tax-exempt association to facilitate financial management. In general, facil... (read more)

6
alexherwix
5y
Dear Tobias, thank you for your insightful remarks, I hope that you find some of the things that we talked about already reflected in the plan :) We try to listen and incorporate feedback, especially, when there is experience to back it up! Again, I am answering from own perspective and may not represent the full team. Regarding your concerns for services, we are very aware of this and now that I think about it, it may have been useful to add our one-year roadmap to illustrate how we want to start our initiative. Rest assured we are very much following along the lines that you outline at the moment. We are organizing an Unconference style retreat, a community building retreat, additional advanced workshops and we are also considering to organize a EAGx in Germany again next year (this is still more dependent on what other players are doing, though). So, next to setting up the basic infrastructure most of our efforts are focused on delivering key events with high expected value. Regarding your concerns for outreach, at the moment we seem to be following a very inward looking approach, trying to improve community building within EA in Germany ("the product"). Based on improving this "product" we hope to organically scale by word of mouth. However, there is also the possibility of investigating other outreach opportunities as time goes on. I personally, have a slightly different perception regarding introductory workshops as we have had great experience with those. Things like basic rationality training combined with an EA touch or career workshops for beginners seem to be in high demand and are generally perceived as useful or interesting. I do agree, though, that only a small fraction of those people who attend make the jump across the chasm to become deeply involved EAs. That's an interesting phenomenon to study and I am not entirely sure what to make of it yet. There are many (competing) perspectives one can take regarding the "desirability" of this situation a
5
Chris Leong
5y
What's EAF focusing on now and why did it decide to deprioritise community building?

Based on the evident popularity of existing written content, and the widespread wish to see existing content consolidated, we are investing in a new web interface for organisers. This will involve editing existing community generated content, and assimilating it into a central, visually appealing interface. The new interface will be based on the EA Hub, which will itself be modernised and restructured. Where possible, we will facilitate editorial additions from the community, in order to make the tool a logical home for sharing resources.

As I'm sure you... (read more)

9
Richenda
6y
Hi Tobias. From what Sarah (developer of the CEA groups app) told me, the tool will provide a dashboard where organisers can use CRM functionality to track their members, categorise them, and communicate with them efficiently. The EA Hub does not plan to provide anything along these lines at all. Since its launch in 2014, the EA Hub has offered: * Personal profiles for EAs * A donation registry * A map of EAs and of EA groups * Group profiles * The EA wiki * The EA Survey * Various guides and information The planned change will be to rearrange content and services so that the user interface is significantly more accessible and appealing. The main addition is to create a high quality home for written guides and resources relating to EA groups. Primarily, this does not involve creating new content but rather gathering existing content from across the community, and synthesising these into a practical and convenient tool. Of course copyright and authorial permission will be carefully attended to. We may make some minimal functional changes such as removing the EA groups feature (which we would then replace with a more simple directory, since we know of many visitors who found a local group on the EA Hub via google, and thus became counterfactually connected). We are very happy to keep people informed in the coming months as development unfolds, thanks!

The English version of our annual review is now online: https://ea-foundation.org/blog/review-2017/

If you have any thoughts on our plans, our annual review, or both: We'd love to hear what people think of EAF's work and if there are things you think we could improve, so please feel free to leave a comment here.

They also work for me, using Firefox.

But what I really wanted to say is that the reserach agenda looks great! I'm of course especially excited about the potential research projects mentioned in the section "The Value of the Future" :) Great to see that these questions are getting more attention!

I've shared the post with EA group leaders in the German-speaking community.

4
MichaelPlant
6y
Totally agree. I combed through the research agenda and thought there was loads of cool stuff there.

It's not just you. I very much share this sentiment, as do many other EAs that I know.

FWIW, this blog post by Nate Soares on the topic of altruistic motivations really resonated with me: http://mindingourway.com/altruistic-motivations/

I realized reading this that I haven't thought much about REG. It sounds like they do good things, but I'm a bit skeptical re: their ability to make good use of the marginal donation they get. I don't think a small budget, by itself, is strong evidence that they could make good use of more money. Can you talk more about what convinced you that they're a good giving opportunity on the margin? (I'm thinking out loud here, don't mean this paragraph to be a criticism.)

Thanks for bringing this up, Topher!

As Michael said, there are various things we would do ... (read more)