Things I’m curious about city or national groups trying

By Rob Gledhill @ 2022-07-08T18:29 (+24)

I think that city and national groups mostly do a good job of prioritising the opportunities that they have available to them. There are a few areas that seem like they have the potential to be high impact, but that I don’t hear much about (n.b., not that I hear nothing about, but less than I’d expect). My confidence level is low, as I think there is a reasonable chance that

1. These areas would not be high impact
2. These areas are already happening, and I just hear about them less than I’d expect for some reason

With those caveats in mind, I’d be very interested in hearing community builders’ reactions to the following ideas:

• Forwarding specific job adverts to specific community members.
  • Why: As of time of writing the EA Consulting network (EACN) has recently placed two people in highly impactful EA roles in the last 2 months, both of which said they would not have applied had EACN not nudged them to do so. There are many people who consistently underrate their own abilities, and being told that they could be good at a job seems like a very valuable service
  • Testability: Seems cheap to test - an hour per fortnight scanning the 80k job board and sending relevant placements to community members. If no placements in 6 months, maybe this isn’t valuable
• Tabling (not at universities)
  • Why: Tabling has long been used by university groups, to great effect, but I have not heard of attempts to do this in spaces with high potential professionals
  • Testability: Running a 1-off test in collaboration with a workplace or professional group, seems like a cheap test. To act as a point of comparison: In the Netherlands tabling at universities found 50+ people who want to take a book, 20+ sign ups for intro events and 5+ fellowship sign-ups
• Testing models of community building
  • Why: Each group has its own strategy for community building. Many of these are shared (e.g., here). However it is really hard to compare these strategies, as it is difficult to disentangle the impact of the strategy, luck, local conditions, and the ability of the community builder (among other factors). Tests where community builders try to mentor community builders from smaller groups to use their model would (a) provide valuable insights on community building strategies (b) deliver value via mentorship
  • Testability: Pretty high investment, I don’t see any quick tests here
• Establishing programs to develop the skills that target hiring managers’ needs, as defined here (some needs are already targeted e.g., AGI SF, but there are still gaps)
  • Why: The main impact of community building comes through the community going on to do cool stuff. It seems sensible to try and build a community that best enables the cool stuff. I already see examples of these, and they often appear very valuable, which makes me wonder why I don't see even more examples. These efforts could either be
    • Community building in areas where you expect to find specific skills (e.g., co-hosting talks with policy groups to attract people with policy skills)
    • Building/identify skills directly (e.g., an internship program to either develop skills in launching new projects, or finding people who are already good at that)
  • Testability: Some groups are already explicitly targeting skills, e.g., AGI SF or EA DC's talks in partnerships with other organizations, and success can be judged of these. There are also some ecosystem wide projects (e.g., CEA’s Launch internship) which could inform the viability of replicating these types of programs

N.b., an earlier version said EA Netherlands were having an upcoming collaboration with Training for Good, although this is no longer planned