A Framework for Assessing the Potential of EA Development in Emerging Locations

By jahying @ 2019-08-24T14:31 (+86)

I would like to thank Max Daniel, Jan Kulveit, Alex Barry, Ozzie Gooen, David Nash, Rose Hadshar, Harri Besceli, Emiel Riiko, Florent Berthet, Jaime Sevilla, Chi Nguyen and Aaron Gertler for reviewing this post. Special thanks to Vaidehi Agarwalla for her immense help with copyediting and research assistance. Also thank you to Wanyi Zeng who inspired my research project and has offered generous support since its inception.

This framework evolved out of research conducted as part of the 2019 CEA Summer Research Fellowship. My research project looks at how EA should be developed and approached in Asia. My research mentors were Rose Hadshar and Jan Kulveit. Please note that this post is not endorsed by the FHI, CEA, Open Phil, or other individuals and organizations interviewed as part of the research project.

If you would like to support my work, I am currently looking for funding, advisors and collaborators. You can reach me at jahying.chung@gmail.com.

If you are short on time, the Summary, Background and Summary Table sections should provide a sufficient overview of the framework.

Summary

Effective Altruism is growing globally. In Asia, for instance, the number of groups has doubled in the last 2 years [1]. Both group organizers and core EA decision-makers have voiced different views and concerns on how (or whether) this growth should happen. In order to avoid overlooking major risks and opportunities, improve communication, and prevent frustration across parties, how might we get everyone on the same page and have productive conversations about developing EA in an emerging location?

This framework attempts to answer that question. It aims to provide a common basis on which different stakeholders can evaluate the potential of EA development in emerging locations. It arose out of expert interviews with core EAs who are actively thinking about community and movement building strategy, including staff at CEA and Open Phil, community managers within other EA organizations, and leading group organizers around the world.

This post will first outline the reasons to work on this topic, the value of the framework, and its current status and limitations. Then it will present the framework in the form of a summary table before going in depth into each dimension. Finally, I outline my next steps in applying this framework to Asian locations.

In short, the framework applies two types of analyses: group analysis and geographic analysis, and considers two perspectives: cause-generic and cause-specific.

In the group analysis, the framework breaks down the question of “how promising is this group?” into three aspects:

• Group traction: what has the group accomplished so far?
• Capabilities: what resources do they have?
• Connections: how do they collaborate/coordinate with other EAs? How are resources transferred? Who do they most frequently interact with, and in what capacity?

In the geographic analysis, the framework breaks down the question “how exciting would EA be in this location?” into three aspects:

• Existing Alignment: how much alignment already exists with EA ideas?
• Talent: what types of talent exist here, in quantity and quality?
• Business and Politics: how does power work here? What influential institutions exist here?

The analysis can be done from a cause-generic perspective and cause-specific [2] perspective.

The full framework has not yet been applied to specific locations and I expect to make adjustments based on feedback from group organizers and core EAs as it is applied and evaluated.

Background

Terminology

Throughout this post I will use the following terms which need some justification or clarification:

• EA development: instead of using the terms “community building” or “movement building”, I chose a more generic term to describe general growth or change, to avoid giving readers preconceptions of what EA should look like in emerging locations.
• Location: in this post, this refers to places that are at a national scale or below, i.e. national, provincial and city. The framework may also apply to student groups and sub-groups (e.g. focusing on a particular cause, industry or set of institutions), but the degree of applicability is less clear here.
• Core decision-makers: members of the core EA community that control resource distribution to community building efforts, including those at CEA, Open Phil and EA fund managers.

Motivation

I was driven to create this framework after noticing communication gaps between core EA decision-makers and local organizers in Asia. While the framework is location-agnostic, the following account describes the specific experiences that motivated me to conduct this research on Asia, and led to the development of this framework. In providing this contextual information, it is not my intent to lay blame to actors on either side, especially given that peoples’ actions are often more reasonable and justified once you understand the conditions they’re operating under. However, I do want to give readers a clear picture of the situation I observed, to illustrate why I thought this was an important and urgent problem.

This project started from a conversation with an Asian organizer who had been working on EA in their country for several years. They mentioned confusion and frustration in coordinating with †core EA decision-makers around funding and strategy planning. For example, they had difficulties securing funding, mentioning that they had applied and were rejected for both a community building and non-community building grant, and were unable to get feedback on these grants until meeting with an evaluator at an EA event overseas. They also said, “We operate independently but we have concerns to be at risk of not being aligned with CEA/EA globally. In general, people obey a head office’s rules and instructions because they are directly under the charge of the HQ. But it’s funny that EA chapters also feel this way when we are neither funded nor given concrete support.”

At roughly the same time, I became involved in community calls with EA organizers across Asia. To my surprise, there were many more organizers than I expected, including multiple people from Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, and India. The EA group survey showed that the number of EA groups has doubled in Asia in the last two years. Additionally, there were a growing number of EA-relevant actors in Asia in both EA and EA-adjacent organizations, as well as donors.

On these calls and subsequent one-on-one conversations with key members of the EA Asia community, I noticed that others were uncertain about how to coordinate with core EAs and plan strategy in their local locations. Some organizers had almost no contact with core EAs, while others pointed to specific issues they’d had in the past, like difficulties with grant logistics. Some members of the community felt it was unclear what types of support are accessible for Asia group organizers, while others had the impression that core decision-makers thought non-China Asian countries were “not worth their time”.

This is exacerbated by the lack of systematic and comprehensive investigation into the risks and opportunities of further EA development in Asia. The existing EA literature on this is generic and primarily focused on risk (e.g. fidelity model of spreading ideas, why not to rush translation). Conducting in-depth investigation into the potential of emerging locations does not fall clearly under the remit of any existing EA organizations, and leading meta organizations are already time- and capacity-constrained.

At this point, I started to feel worried about the default trajectory of EA in Asia. Having spent much more time engaging with core EAs, including decision-makers, than most Asian organizers, I felt there were important gaps in communication, understanding, and expectations that needed to be filled. It seemed that if things stayed the same, there would be ever increasing confusion, frustration, and even antagonism amongst a growing number of Asian organizers. This could also lead to misalignment, fragmentation, unilateralism, or the misallocation of resources. It could also damage the reputation of EA, and the movement could miss out on large opportunities to do good. My hope is that this framework can help to bridge some of the communication gaps and improve the trajectory of EA development in Asia.

Current Bottlenecks

What is creating confusion and frustration for EA Asia organizers? Based on my interviews of Asia organizers, I have found several possible bottlenecks.

Ambiguous Terminology Used in Evaluation[3]

At a high-level, core EA community often use terms to describe people, groups, and even locations, that are not explicitly defined. The terms “promising” or “exciting” are often used to describe people and projects. New members to the EA community may also be assessed on how “aligned” they are. In one of my interviews, one Asian organizer was confused about this and specifically asked: “Are we ‘EA enough’?”. It seems challenging for local organizers with infrequent interactions with the core to understand the implicit meaning of terms that may be commonly used in evaluative contexts.

On an organizational level, CEA has published their model for evaluating grant applications where they concretely state three equally-weighted evaluation criteria:

1. Ability and skill set of applicant
2. Applicant understanding of and engagement with effective altruism and effective altruism community building
3. Future potential of the effective altruism group (where relevant)

These criteria are still confusing for local organizers: how do they demonstrate whether they fulfill these criteria? For example, one decision-maker mentioned that one of the ways they assess someone’s understanding of EA (part of Criteria #2) is by looking at the connections that the person has within the EA core community, and the core community’s impressions of the person. While the use of proxies such as connections and impressions for assessment may be common knowledge within the core community, group organizers with limited interactions often do not have access to this implicit information. These types of implicit information are often communicated through in-person conversations.

While group organizers know what criteria are being assessed, they don’t understand how to demonstrate their fulfilment of the criteria. It is possible that they might develop a sound development strategy, but fail to communicate critical information in their funding proposals. This, combined with a historically constrained capacity of decision-makers to provide frequent communication with and feedback to remote group organizers, may exacerbate confusion and frustration.

Uncertainties and Unknowns Around Local Strategy

Given the above, organizers, especially in locations that are very different from established EA communities, find it particularly challenging to figure out their strategy with existing EA group resources. Some of the questions they found challenging to answer include:

• “What if strategies suggested by [core EAs] are not as relevant to the country/city’s context? For example, when the group size is still small and maturity of community is more similar to the nascent days of EA movement building than now? Another example is when there is higher expected value in leveraging on ‘effective giving’ rather than ‘career impact’ in that city/country?”
• “We at EA [country name redacted] are still unsure about which cause areas and what type of outreach/community building to focus on (i.e. do we focus on outreach on a specific cause area first?)” and “Should we be doing outreach/fundraising?”
• “Which demographics should we be reaching out to? And which ones not to?”

This also seems to create a negative feedback loop; since organizers don’t know what information to collect to inform their strategy, evaluators feel that there is insufficient information to make decisions, and try to reduce risk by discouraging additional action in the organizer’s location and in turn reducing additional efforts to gather more information that could improve decision-making in the location.

Low-Fidelity Transfer of Community Building Models

Finally, all of the above effects may be further exacerbated by the current way of transferring existing models. This was described by one organizer: “Major decisions regarding the ‘latest directions’ of EA movement [are] not well communicated to [group organizers]. How do [we] get the most up-to-date thinking and concerns with a human instead of via checking in on a forum post which might be missed, so that we are keeping our alignment with the movement as a whole and to also have a reliable channel to provide feedback?”.

Models often require many hours of discussion for a high-fidelity transfer, which is particularly challenging for organizers living far from EA hubs, who may not have the ability (due to personal circumstances or finances) to frequently travel and attend EA events and conferences like EA Globals.

Target Audience and Usage

This framework aims to address current bottlenecks by providing local group organizers with a specific list of considerations that core EA evaluators may use when assessing the potential and importance of their group and geography. Hence, this framework is primarily designed for group organizers. However, I believe the framework also benefits evaluators and, ultimately, the EA community overall.

Purpose and Value

• Disambiguate terminology used in core EA's explicit and less clear-cut models by looking at specific considerations and questions pertaining to community-building
• Aggregate considerations in one place so organizers do not have to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel when conducting self-assessment and strategy planning
• Provide a common basis for conversations between group organizers and evaluators, both on the evaluated content and methods of evaluation themselves

Use Cases and Benefits for Organizers

• Understand and identify relevant considerations to conduct self-assessment and group strategy planning
• Identify current knowledge gaps and important areas for further research
• Enable organizers to have more specific conversations about evaluators’ considerations and weighting, say, before applying, to increase relevancy and reduce unnecessary work or stress.
• Prepare and present relevant considerations to evaluators when applying for grants. Where possible, this should be done in combination with an understanding of the evaluator’s weighting of considerations.
• Provide justification on strategic choices based on thorough analyses of their group and geography. This seems especially important when evaluators may have little knowledge of the location.
• Understand geographically specific considerations that may not be relevant to well-connected groups near EA hubs

Benefits for Evaluators

• Augment current data collection processes, possibly improving comprehensiveness and increasing efficiency by reducing back-and-forth with grant applicants.
• The framework may provide additional data points for evaluators to assess organizer’s competence, based on how they engage with and respond to key considerations
• Provide a general, more comprehensive blueprint on which more specific framework templates can be developed, say for city groups vs. national groups vs. student groups.
• Also, enable evaluators to have more direct conversations about their considerations and weightings with grant applicants.

Benefits for the EA Community

• More accurate assessments of potential risks and benefits of EA development in emerging locations
• Better strategies developed at the local level, based on more thorough analyses
• Improvement in the global allocation of community building resources
• Improved coordination and communication across borders

Status and Limitations of the Framework

I consider this framework to be in its minimally viable state. I expect potentially significant updates as it is used by group organizers and decision-makers. This has happened twice during this post’s review process.

Perhaps the most important caveat to include is that, while I believe in the importance of alignment and coordination, I am not saying, via this framework, that local organizers should expect or rely on core EAs to provide guidance in the development of their local strategies. Given general conditions of uncertainty (possibly cluelessness) and capacity constraints, I think the onus is on local organizers to independently develop a thorough map of their group and geography, develop a strategy based on this understanding, and educate core EAs on the map and explain how this leads to the associated strategy.

The framework supports this process by:

1. Providing a more comprehensive and specific set of considerations for organizers to use as part of their local mapping process. I would like to stress that the framework is by no means exhaustive and organizers should actively look for other considerations that may be relevant and important.
2. Improve alignment and communication with core EAs by helping organizers understand what their key considerations may be. To be clear, I am not implying that current models or evaluation criteria are necessarily appropriate for all local contexts. For example, some organizers may decide that talent routing to core EA organizations is not appropriate in their geography - which considerations should be applied largely depends on local organizers’ judgment.

Beyond this, I have identified several other limitations of the framework in its current iteration, in the form of questions it has yet to answer:

• Group specificity: what specific considerations apply to different group types (e.g. national vs. city vs. student)? This might entail adapting the framework for different group types.
• Cause specificity: what specific considerations apply to different cause areas? This could be answered by speaking with leading cause area experts and organizations to identify their key considerations for further work in emerging locations, e.g. Asia.
• Implementation guidelines: how should organizers piece the different aspects together to form a strategy? How should evaluators weigh the different criteria?
• Accuracy assessment: how should evaluators assess the accuracy of reports put together using this framework?

In terms of the scale of application, I believe the framework can be used to produce valuable information on the national, city or student-group level. This framework is likely less valuable at larger scales, say sub-regions like Southeast Asia or across entire continents like Asia. That said, it’s possible that as local analyses are aggregated, we could identify common themes that could be acted upon at a larger scale.

Methodology

My intent was not to produce a complete new model or radically change existing ones; I wanted to aggregate and clarify key considerations in evaluation that already exist in the minds of decision-makers. Hence, my primary methodology was conducting expert interviews with core EAs and local organizers. I supplemented this with EA literature review and testing the application of existing business frameworks related to market entry.

Expert interviews

I conducted 21 interviews (ranging between 30-90 minutes, some included follow-up conversations in-person and via email) with decision-makers, including people working at meta orgs (e.g. CEA and Open Phil), community managers at EA organizations (e.g. CFAR), group organizers in established locations (e.g. Czechia, Geneva, Stanford), and group organizers in Asia (Singapore, India, Philippines).

I mainly employed a user interview technique commonly used in startup product development, which favours asking open-ended, non-leading questions, which allows interviewees to express thoughts without interruption and interviewers to follow their curiosity based on interviewee responses rather than fixed scripts. As mentioned, the guiding direction was determining which questions, if answered, would inform or change this person’s view on what we should do in an Asian country.

Testing Existing Frameworks

Given that we are looking at developing EA in “new markets”, I thought it might be appropriate to look at leading business frameworks used for doing market entry analysis. While none was a great fit, I drew some inspiration from the following:

• SWOT: the Group vs. Location distinction reflects something similar to the internal (strengths and weaknesses) and external (opportunities and threats) distinction.
• PEST(LE): I took some inspiration from the PESTLE categories, but felt that I could be more specific in identifying aspects that were particularly relevant to EA. For example, looking directly at the Talent dimension, rather than a more general analysis of Economic or Social factors.

Some early reviewers asked why I did not use the Importance, Neglectedness, and Tractability (INT) framework. While INT is not at odds with the framework I have created, it is not particularly useful in probing the depth of analysis required for the evaluation. As one organizer put it: “[the framework described in this post] naturally leads to an inside view of a location. That is, applying your framework gets me closer to developing [a] strategic plan suited to a particular location, while the INT just gives me an outside view that is hard to act upon”. Further, the INT does not accurately capture the way evaluators currently assess locations.

EA Literature Review

I supplemented interviewee responses and my understanding with EA literature about the theories and application of community and movement building, including:

• How valuable is movement growth?
  
• Long-term Influence and Movement Growth
  
• New Report on Early Field Growth
  
• Why develop national level effective altruism organizations
  
• Fidelity model of spreading ideas
  
• Why not to rush to translate effective altruism into other languages
  
• CEA Models and Updates
  
• EA Community Building page
  
• Model of an EA group
  
• EA Community Building grants update
  
• CEA’s current thinking
  
• And more generally, articles under Models of Movement Building
  

Framework

This framework attempts to consolidate all possible considerations decision-makers may use when evaluating groups and locations. Note that the specific weighting given to each consideration will vary across decision-makers; some may not matter at all, while others may only matter up to a certain threshold (as more of a pass/fail indicator).

Summary Table

Full Details

Note that the following list is far from exhaustive. I attempt to provide more specificity and make considerations more tangible using examples, but it’s highly likely that I have not covered all relevant types of examples. Further work needs to be done to improve comprehensiveness (see Next Steps section for details).

Group Analysis

This section includes the group traction, organizer capabilities, and community connections.Information from group analysis may also inform non-grant related decisions, e.g. how and where to allocate community health resources or non-monetary group support.

Group Traction

• Membership/funnel metrics (See CEA lead metrics)
• Size and engagement of membership, for instance:
• Number of people who attend 25%+ of events or >1 event every two months (as measured in the EA Groups Survey)
• Size of mailing list
• Event attendance
• Types and scale of activities
• What types of activities are organized?
• The size of events
• The regularity of events
• How many people attend?
• What types of people attend?
• Key accomplishments [primarily for developing or mature groups]
• Career outcomes (see CEA lag metrics)
• Money moved to vetted organizations
• Key relationships built
• GWWC Pledges
• Does the group have a functional activity focus?
• E.g. EA Geneva specializes in talent routing and policy
• What success has it had in this area?
• What comparative advantage(s) does it have here?
• Community health metrics
• How welcoming do people find the group?
• Do those focused on a non-prioritised cause feel welcome?
• Do people from relevant (context-dependent) minority groups feel welcome?
• Do group members feel like they are part of a community?
• Do group members feel supported by the local group?
• Have there been any major community issues?
• How were they dealt with?
• How did this affect other group members’ perception of the group?
• Resources developed for local context
• Group challenges/bottlenecks

Organizer Capabilities

• Understanding of EA and EA community building
• Time involved in the movement
• Familiarity with cause areas and EA principles
• Research on EA-relevant cause areas
• Participation in online community: EA forum posts, Facebook groups etc.
• Familiarity with EA community building theory
• General ability and skill set
• Organizational experience
• Community building (i.e. running or founding a college or city group)
• Operations and management (professionally or academically for example consulting, startup founder, project manager etc.)
• Social and presentation skills
• Functional expertise
• Group plan/strategy
• Access to local resources
• Experience in local location
• Strength of local network, some categories to consider include:
• Local academics
• The government
• Donors
• People working in cause or cause-adjacent areas
• Prestigious educational programs and scholarships
• Cause-related communities, e.g. “animal advocacy and vegan groups, machine learning and AI experts” (Jan Kulveit)
• Potentially value-aligned communities, e.g. “rationality/LessWrong community, transhumanists and other far-futurists” (Jan Kulveit)
• Sources of funding

Community Connections

During the review process there was some confusion as to why this category was valuable, so I have included a rationale behind this section here. Community connections are useful for both group organizers and decision makers. For group organizers it will help them evaluate their own connectedness and how this might inhibit their potential. For decision makers it helps them identify ways they can help organizers and tailor resources to them and understand group differences across regions to correctly determine the reasons for a group’s potential or lack thereof. Finally, resources like funding, talent, networks, shared culture are not interchangeable and require different solutions to fix (i.e. providing funding will not necessarily improve a network bottleneck).

• Engagement with EA community
• Involvement with EA organizations
• Internships, fellowships, volunteering at EA organizations
• Work(ed) for an EA organization
• Partnerships with EA organizations
• Participated in EA organization programs
• Have engaged in 80,000 Hours career advice
• Have taken a Giving Pledge
• Events attended, e.g. EAG, EAGx, CEA retreats, local and regional retreats
• Network & support
• Their EA network of friends and acquaintances
• Conversations with core EAs
• Who do they go to for support or advice?
• Who has been most helpful or supportive?
• What support might they be missing?
• Use of EA group resources
• Applicable resources
• What resources have they found most helpful so far?
• What resources do they most frequently share with:
• other members?
• other organizers?
• Challenges of usage
• Are there resources that they feel are missing?
• Are there resources that don’t work in the local context?
• What resources have been developed locally?
• Opportunities for regional coordination
• Resource Sharing: How might this country share resources with priority countries, especially those within the region?
• E.g. High net worth individuals in Singapore or Taiwan interested in donating to other Asian countries
• Regional travel: How difficult is it for people in this country to travel within their region?

Geographic Analysis

The geographic analysis looks at the local existing alignment, talent, and business and politics.

Existing Alignment

Both cause-generic and cause-specific perspectives can be applied to these considerations.

Culture and History

• Philosophy
• What philosophies align with EA ways of thought?
• E.g. Mohism in China (forum post)
• How mainstream or well-accepted are these philosophies?
• Translation
• To what extent is English used in this location?
• How easy is it to translate and apply existing EA ideas?
• What translated resources already exist?
• What is local sentiment towards foreign ideas and influence?
• Movements
• What are some of the past movements that have occurred in this location?
• How have past movements looked like in this location?
• How successful were movements involving the import of ideologies that first originated from Western countries?
• How transferable are lessons learned from Western movements?

Philanthropic Environment

• Who are the main recipients of this country’s donations (private and public)?
• What does the donor landscape look like?
• What are the main types of agents behind international philanthropic activities?
• What does the local charity culture like?
• How much, where and in what manner do people give their resources (time, money, influence)?
• What are relevant sources of funding available for EA activities?
• How easy is it to raise funds in this country?
• Are there restrictions on foreign funding?

Existing EA Presence

• What EA organizations and staff operate in this country?
• Which EA-adjacent organizations and people operate in this country?
• E.g. Copenhagen Consensus Center in Bangladesh

Talent

Both cause-generic and specific lenses can be applied to these considerations.

• Type and quantity of talent: What types of top talent are produced in this country?
• Academia
• Business and Technology
• Government
• Key educational institutions

Specific considerations for international talent routing:

• Institution ranking
• How good are these institutions compared to the rest of the world?
• How good is the talent relative to the rest of the world?
• How difficult is it for country nationals to obtain work visas in EA hubs?

Business & Politics

Cause-Generic

• Routes to influence: What are the routes to influence in this country? How tractable are they?
• Geopolitical concerns, influence and alliances
• Are there particularly relevant geopolitical concerns?
• E.g. Iran, Korea, Pakistan
• What geopolitical influence and alliances does this country have?
• E.g. Singapore has taken steps to become a prime location for international arbitration. Recently, Singapore has made efforts to become the mediation point for US-China trade disputes.
• E.g. ASEAN (South East Asian countries) and SAARC (South Asian countries)

Cause-Specific

• Technology transfer: What potential does this country have for technology transfer?
• Example from cell-based meat: Israel’s R&D and entrepreneurial environment and Japan’s pre-eminence and seminal work in stem cells make them great at tech transfer
• What ability does this country have to set precedents for regulations or legislation?
• E.g. GDPR started in the EU but is spreading globally
• Knowledge centers which have potential for tech transfer to countries like China and India
• Presence of key institutions: Are key companies or R&D centers for EA-related causes present in this country?
• E.g. AI Labs in Japan and Korea
• Control of supply chains: What supply chains does this country control or play a key part in?
• E.g. Taiwan is a key global producer of semiconductors, which is part of the AI supply chain
• Ability to act as a testing ground
• E.g. Animal welfare seems tractable in Taiwan (see grant made to EAST), and successful models could be replicated in other places in Asia

Next Steps: Applying the Framework to Asian Countries

To reiterate, I developed this framework to help improve communication and coordination between core EAs and group organizers in Asia. The next step is putting the framework into practice and testing its useability with organizers and evaluators. Here are some ways I plan to go about this:

Facilitation and Coordination

• Present the framework at EA events
• I will share my research at EA retreats and conferences in China, Singapore, and Australia.
• The format is yet to be confirmed, but it will likely be a workshop.
• Work with organizers to apply the framework
• I plan to present and workshop the framework with Asia organizers at the EA Asia retreat in October.
• I want to continue following up with organizers as they use the framework
• Since one organizer from EA Spain has already started applying the framework to their local group, I may also provide support to organizers beyond Asia
• Facilitate conversations between group organizers and decision-makers and/or EA organizations
• Continue to make introductions and support group calls related to my research, especially for ecosystem mapping and country report development
• Try to create opportunities for cross-border dialogue, especially at regional and global events (e.g. an EA Asia panel, meetups, private meetings)

Research and Tool Development

• Iterate the framework based on user feedback
• Conduct further research to address current limitations of the framework
• E.g. speak with cause area experts to identify cause-specific considerations
• Other research
• Create an ecosystem map of EA in Asia
• Provide a tool to improve understanding and coordination between core EAs and local organizers in Asia. One common use case would be to facilitate introductions to key EAs in Asia.
• I currently have a low-fidelity version of the map that will require significant additional data to improve robustness.
• Conduct survey of EA organizers in Asia, possibly in collaboration with CEA
• Based on my initial work in mapping, I identified several pieces of decision-relevant information that are currently missing from existing survey data.
• Vaidehi Agarwalla and I have put together a survey and are coordinating discussing with Alex Barry on coordinating data collection efforts with CEA
• Investigate key questions raised by core EA orgs
• Supporting staff at core EA orgs with research and tool development needs related to the Asia region
• Establish advisory board for further work on EA in Asia
• I am in the process of building an advisory board consisting of core EAs (community/movement builders/strategists at EA organizations) and group organizers (experienced organizers in Asia and globally).

If you are interested in supporting and/or funding this work, please get in touch with me at jahying.chung@gmail.com.

Footnotes

1: From EA Groups 2019 Survey Data (accessed by request, data has not yet been published)

2: Most questions from the “Cause specific” perspective are specific versions of the General EA perspective questions. One major exception is in the Business & Politics dimension. Further work should be done to identify cause-specific questions as these may differ greatly from cause to cause.

3: During the review process of this post, there were also disagreements from local organizers around the world (beyond Asia) about the right metrics to use to evaluate groups. This seems like an important topic for further investigation, but falls outside the scope of this current post.