Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Forum engagement doubled in the last year, published by Ben West on November 4, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

For CEA's Q3 update, we're sharing multiple posts on different aspects of our work.

The Effective Altruism Forum aims to be the central place for collaborative discussion about how to do the most good.

Metric status

Hours of engagement are up by 100.2% year-over-year as of October 1. This meets our target of 100%, and means we’ve doubled engagement hours this year.

This metric specifically tracks hours spent on the Forum by logged-in users. We weren't tracking it until 2020, but based on other data we have, we estimate that the previous year's growth rate was 90%, for two-year growth of ~380%.

This chart shows daily engagement hours for 2020 (yellow) and 2021 (blue). The red line shows our daily "target" (the numbers we'd need to hit to reach 100% YoY growth if our engagement grew linearly).

In response to a comment, we'll also share our graph for monthly active users (people who viewed at least one page while logged in):

We went from 727 MAUs in 10/2019 to 1140 in 10/2020 and 1954 in 10/2021.

Progress this quarter

Key progress:

We onboarded 2 new engineers: Sarah Cheng and Jonathan Mustin.

We published the community and events page and hired a contractor to make sure the list of events is up to date every week.

We cross-posted hundreds of older articles from EA sources to the Forum, to make them taggable and searchable within the site. This includes blog posts from Open Philanthropy, papers from the Global Priorities Institute, and podcast transcripts from 80,000 Hours.

We helped Holden Karnofsky cross-post a series of successful posts from his Cold Takes blog, starting with this one.

We launched a creative writing contest.

Other progress:

We implemented several new user-visible features:

Post analytics

Forum Digest subscription reminder

Sidebar banner

We got Cypress testing working, with a handful of initial tests. This won’t have a direct impact on users, but will make it easier for us to test our code. This was a large project – LessWrong started working on it over 2 years ago.

~150 people have ordered books from the order link we posted in the EA Handbook.

Reflections

I estimate that engineering output tripled in September (e.g. all three of the user-visible features I mentioned were released in September.) This is in line with the tripling of team size. Given that Sarah just started this month, I’m pretty happy with that increase in productivity, though I also think that I could have made the onboarding process even smoother.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: CEA’s headcount nearly doubled in 2021 (and other updates), published by MaxDalton on November 4, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

For CEA's Q3 update, we're sharing multiple posts on different aspects of our work.

People

At this time one year ago, we had 16 people on our core team. Accounting for confirmed arrivals and departures, we now have 29 people on our core team.

Overall, we think we’ve managed to grow the team rapidly while also raising our bar for new hires.

Role Changes

Nicole Ross is transitioning to the role of manager of the Community Health team. Katie Glass, who was previously the team’s interim manager, is now focused on developing hiring systems and helping to build systems for tracking metrics.

Hires

In Q3, we made the following hires:

Jonathan Michel (Operations Associate, incoming in December)

Lizka Vaintrob (Events Generalist, started in September)

Ollie Base (Events Generalist, incoming in November)

Jessica McCurdy (Scalable Uni Support, part-time)

Will Payne (Groups Associate: Campus Specialist Manager)

Kuhan Jeyapragasan (Groups Associate: Campus Specialist Manager, part-time)

We had been planning to hire about five people in Q3. We surpassed this target, but some of our new joiners had already been working with us in a contracting capacity, and are simply increasing their hours or becoming more integrated with the team.

For at least one hiring round, I think we should have communicated more promptly with applicants and given them more detailed feedback. We’ve increased tracking of applicant communications, and email support for hiring managers, to try to ensure prompt responses and substantive feedback for applicants that make it far in our process.

Hiring plans

We’re currently hiring for an Executive Assistant and a Finance Associate. We’re also welcoming general expressions of interest, as well as expressions of interest for a Full Stack Engineer.

Departures

Barry Grimes, Harri Besceli, and Aaron Gertler will transition out of CEA during Q4. Sky Mayhew is transitioning from being a member of the Community Health team to contracting with CEA. Louis Dixon also departed CEA at the end of Q3, replaced in his role as our finance lead by Litawn Gan (as mentioned in a previous update).

Morale

The average morale reported for Q3 was 7.17/10, compared with 7.03/10 in Q2.

Org chart

Team retreat

We ran our first team retreat since the pandemic in late August/September. 16 people came together in a venue near Oxford. The average likelihood to recommend the event was 9.07/10, and attendees thought the event was 7x more valuable than the counterfactual use of their time (geometric mean). Broadly, we think that this helped a lot with onboarding new hires, and that people left the event feeling excited about the impact we can have together.

Operations

The Operations team aims to provide the financial, legal, administrative, grantmaking, logistical, and fundraising support that enables CEA, 80,000 Hours, the Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, the Centre for the Governance of AI and Giving What We Can to run efficiently.

Operations Associate hiring: We hired Jonathan Michel to run operations in our Oxford office. Jonathan will start in December.

Office refurbishment: The office is now fully up and running. We’re still making small improvements to lighting and catering, but users are happy.

Improvements to financial systems:

We adjusted our financial year in the USA so that it aligns with the UK entity, which will allow us to present consolidated accounts going forward.

Audits were completed for both the UK and the US.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software: We have completed the discovery phase with our Salesforce developer partner, and they have begun to build the CRM.

In Q4, our primary focus will be working with the groups team and group orga...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: CEA’s headcount nearly doubled in 2021 (and other updates), published by MaxDalton on November 4, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

For CEA's Q3 update, we're sharing multiple posts on different aspects of our work.

People

At this time one year ago, we had 16 people on our core team. Accounting for confirmed arrivals and departures, we now have 29 people on our core team.

Overall, we think we’ve managed to grow the team rapidly while also raising our bar for new hires.

Role Changes

Nicole Ross is transitioning to the role of manager of the Community Health team. Katie Glass, who was previously the team’s interim manager, is now focused on developing hiring systems and helping to build systems for tracking metrics.

Hires

In Q3, we made the following hires:

Jonathan Michel (Operations Associate, incoming in December)

Lizka Vaintrob (Events Generalist, started in September)

Ollie Base (Events Generalist, incoming in November)

Jessica McCurdy (Scalable Uni Support, part-time)

Will Payne (Groups Associate: Campus Specialist Manager)

Kuhan Jeyapragasan (Groups Associate: Campus Specialist Manager, part-time)

We had been planning to hire about five people in Q3. We surpassed this target, but some of our new joiners had already been working with us in a contracting capacity, and are simply increasing their hours or becoming more integrated with the team.

For at least one hiring round, I think we should have communicated more promptly with applicants and given them more detailed feedback. We’ve increased tracking of applicant communications, and email support for hiring managers, to try to ensure prompt responses and substantive feedback for applicants that make it far in our process.

Hiring plans

We’re currently hiring for an Executive Assistant and a Finance Associate. We’re also welcoming general expressions of interest, as well as expressions of interest for a Full Stack Engineer.

Departures

Barry Grimes, Harri Besceli, and Aaron Gertler will transition out of CEA during Q4. Sky Mayhew is transitioning from being a member of the Community Health team to contracting with CEA. Louis Dixon also departed CEA at the end of Q3, replaced in his role as our finance lead by Litawn Gan (as mentioned in a previous update).

Morale

The average morale reported for Q3 was 7.17/10, compared with 7.03/10 in Q2.

Org chart

Team retreat

We ran our first team retreat since the pandemic in late August/September. 16 people came together in a venue near Oxford. The average likelihood to recommend the event was 9.07/10, and attendees thought the event was 7x more valuable than the counterfactual use of their time (geometric mean). Broadly, we think that this helped a lot with onboarding new hires, and that people left the event feeling excited about the impact we can have together.

Operations

The Operations team aims to provide the financial, legal, administrative, grantmaking, logistical, and fundraising support that enables CEA, 80,000 Hours, the Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, the Centre for the Governance of AI and Giving What We Can to run efficiently.

Operations Associate hiring: We hired Jonathan Michel to run operations in our Oxford office. Jonathan will start in December.

Office refurbishment: The office is now fully up and running. We’re still making small improvements to lighting and catering, but users are happy.

Improvements to financial systems:

We adjusted our financial year in the USA so that it aligns with the UK entity, which will allow us to present consolidated accounts going forward.

Audits were completed for both the UK and the US.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software: We have completed the discovery phase with our Salesforce developer partner, and they have begun to build the CRM.

In Q4, our primary focus will be working with the groups team and group orga...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Apply to the ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB) in Berkeley [Jan 3 - Jan 22], published by Habryka on November 3, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

We (Redwood Research and Lightcone Infrastructure) are organizing a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering. We expect to invite about 20 technically talented effective altruists for three weeks of intense learning to Berkeley, taught by engineers working at AI Alignment organizations. The curriculum is designed by Buck Shlegeris (Redwood) and Ned Ruggeri (AppAcademy Co-founder). We will cover all expenses.

We aim to have a mixture of students, young professionals, and people who already have a professional track record in AI Alignment or EA, but want to brush up on their Machine Learning skills.

Dates are Jan 3 2022 - Jan 22 2022. Application deadline is November 15th. We will make application decisions on a rolling basis, but will aim to get back to everyone by November 22nd.

The curriculum is still in flux, but this list might give you a sense of the kinds of things we expect to cover (it’s fine if you don’t know all these terms):

Week 1: PyTorch — learn the primitives of one of the most popular ML frameworks, use them to reimplement common neural net architecture primitives, optimization algorithms, and data parallelism

Week 2: Implementing transformers — reconstruct GPT2, BERT from scratch, play around with the sub-components and associated algorithms (eg nucleus sampling) to better understand them

Week 3: Training transformers — set up a scalable training environment for running experiments, train transformers on various downstream tasks, implement diagnostics, analyze your experiments

(Optional) Week 4: Capstone projects

We’re aware that people start school/other commitments at various points in January, and so are flexible about you attending whatever prefix of the bootcamp works for you.

Logistics

The bootcamp takes place at Constellation, a shared office space in Berkeley for people working on long-termist projects. People from the following organizations often work from the space: MIRI, Redwood Research, Open Philanthropy, Lightcone Infrastructure, Paul Christiano’s Alignment Research Center and more.

As a participant, you’d attend communal lunches and events at Constellation and have a great opportunity to make friends and connections.

If you join the bootcamp, we’ll provide:

Free travel to Berkeley, for both US and international applications

Free housing

Food

Plug-and-play, pre-configured desktop computer with an ML environment for use throughout the bootcamp

You can find a full FAQ and more details in this Google Doc.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Apply to the ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB) in Berkeley [Jan 3 - Jan 22], published by Habryka on November 3, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

We (Redwood Research and Lightcone Infrastructure) are organizing a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering. We expect to invite about 20 technically talented effective altruists for three weeks of intense learning to Berkeley, taught by engineers working at AI Alignment organizations. The curriculum is designed by Buck Shlegeris (Redwood) and Ned Ruggeri (AppAcademy Co-founder). We will cover all expenses.

We aim to have a mixture of students, young professionals, and people who already have a professional track record in AI Alignment or EA, but want to brush up on their Machine Learning skills.

Dates are Jan 3 2022 - Jan 22 2022. Application deadline is November 15th. We will make application decisions on a rolling basis, but will aim to get back to everyone by November 22nd.

The curriculum is still in flux, but this list might give you a sense of the kinds of things we expect to cover (it’s fine if you don’t know all these terms):

Week 1: PyTorch — learn the primitives of one of the most popular ML frameworks, use them to reimplement common neural net architecture primitives, optimization algorithms, and data parallelism

Week 2: Implementing transformers — reconstruct GPT2, BERT from scratch, play around with the sub-components and associated algorithms (eg nucleus sampling) to better understand them

Week 3: Training transformers — set up a scalable training environment for running experiments, train transformers on various downstream tasks, implement diagnostics, analyze your experiments

(Optional) Week 4: Capstone projects

We’re aware that people start school/other commitments at various points in January, and so are flexible about you attending whatever prefix of the bootcamp works for you.

Logistics

The bootcamp takes place at Constellation, a shared office space in Berkeley for people working on long-termist projects. People from the following organizations often work from the space: MIRI, Redwood Research, Open Philanthropy, Lightcone Infrastructure, Paul Christiano’s Alignment Research Center and more.

As a participant, you’d attend communal lunches and events at Constellation and have a great opportunity to make friends and connections.

If you join the bootcamp, we’ll provide:

Free travel to Berkeley, for both US and international applications

Free housing

Food

Plug-and-play, pre-configured desktop computer with an ML environment for use throughout the bootcamp

You can find a full FAQ and more details in this Google Doc.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Apply to the ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB) in Berkeley [Jan 3 - Jan 22], published by Oliver Habryka on November 3, 2021 on The AI Alignment Forum.

We (Redwood Research and Lightcone Infrastructure) are organizing a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering. We expect to invite about 20 technically talented effective altruists for three weeks of intense learning to Berkeley, taught by engineers working at AI Alignment organizations. The curriculum is designed by Buck Shlegeris (Redwood) and Ned Ruggeri (App Academy Co-founder). We will cover all expenses.

We aim to have a mixture of students, young professionals, and people who already have a professional track record in AI Alignment or EA, but want to brush up on their Machine Learning skills.

Dates are Jan 3 2022 - Jan 22 2022. Application deadline is November 15th. We will make application decisions on a rolling basis, but will aim to get back to everyone by November 22nd.

The curriculum is still in flux, but this list might give you a sense of the kinds of things we expect to cover (it’s fine if you don’t know all these terms):

Week 1: PyTorch — learn the primitives of one of the most popular ML frameworks, use them to reimplement common neural net architecture primitives, optimization algorithms, and data parallelism

Week 2: Implementing transformers — reconstruct GPT2, BERT from scratch, play around with the sub-components and associated algorithms (eg nucleus sampling) to better understand them

Week 3: Training transformers — set up a scalable training environment for running experiments, train transformers on various downstream tasks, implement diagnostics, analyze your experiments

(Optional) Week 4: Capstone projects

We’re aware that people start school/other commitments at various points in January, and so are flexible about you attending whatever prefix of the bootcamp works for you.

Logistics

The bootcamp takes place at Constellation, a shared office space in Berkeley for people working on long-termist projects. People from the following organizations often work from the space: MIRI, Redwood Research, Open Philanthropy, Lightcone Infrastructure, Paul Christiano’s Alignment Research Center and more.

As a participant, you’d attend communal lunches and events at Constellation and have a great opportunity to make friends and connections.

If you join the bootcamp, we’ll provide:

Free travel to Berkeley, for both US and international applications

Free housing

Food

Plug-and-play, pre-configured desktop computer with an ML environment for use throughout the bootcamp

You can find a full FAQ and more details in this Google Doc.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Apply to the ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB) in Berkeley [Jan 3 - Jan 22], published by Oliver Habryka on November 3, 2021 on The AI Alignment Forum.

We (Redwood Research and Lightcone Infrastructure) are organizing a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering. We expect to invite about 20 technically talented effective altruists for three weeks of intense learning to Berkeley, taught by engineers working at AI Alignment organizations. The curriculum is designed by Buck Shlegeris (Redwood) and Ned Ruggeri (App Academy Co-founder). We will cover all expenses.

We aim to have a mixture of students, young professionals, and people who already have a professional track record in AI Alignment or EA, but want to brush up on their Machine Learning skills.

Dates are Jan 3 2022 - Jan 22 2022. Application deadline is November 15th. We will make application decisions on a rolling basis, but will aim to get back to everyone by November 22nd.

The curriculum is still in flux, but this list might give you a sense of the kinds of things we expect to cover (it’s fine if you don’t know all these terms):

Week 1: PyTorch — learn the primitives of one of the most popular ML frameworks, use them to reimplement common neural net architecture primitives, optimization algorithms, and data parallelism

Week 2: Implementing transformers — reconstruct GPT2, BERT from scratch, play around with the sub-components and associated algorithms (eg nucleus sampling) to better understand them

Week 3: Training transformers — set up a scalable training environment for running experiments, train transformers on various downstream tasks, implement diagnostics, analyze your experiments

(Optional) Week 4: Capstone projects

We’re aware that people start school/other commitments at various points in January, and so are flexible about you attending whatever prefix of the bootcamp works for you.

Logistics

The bootcamp takes place at Constellation, a shared office space in Berkeley for people working on long-termist projects. People from the following organizations often work from the space: MIRI, Redwood Research, Open Philanthropy, Lightcone Infrastructure, Paul Christiano’s Alignment Research Center and more.

As a participant, you’d attend communal lunches and events at Constellation and have a great opportunity to make friends and connections.

If you join the bootcamp, we’ll provide:

Free travel to Berkeley, for both US and international applications

Free housing

Food

Plug-and-play, pre-configured desktop computer with an ML environment for use throughout the bootcamp

You can find a full FAQ and more details in this Google Doc.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Many groups metrics have grown by 100% to 400% in the past year, published by JoanGass on November 3, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

For CEA's Q3 update, we're sharing multiple posts on different aspects of our work.

We help EA group organizers by advising them, providing resources and funding, and creating online spaces where they can share resources and support each other. The following overview describes support we provide across university groups, city/national groups, and our virtual programs platform.

Some highlights:

We did more support calls this quarter than we did in the whole of last year.

We estimate that around 970 people started an 8-week fellowship (virtual or in-person) related to effective altruism this quarter. This compares to 184 for the same period last year.[1] This 5x growth is partly (but not wholly) due to our additional support for groups generally, for fellowships in particular, and for virtual programs.

We tested out retreats and remote summer training programs to help us identify and train potential full-time organizers at focus universities.

Due to this, as well as the efforts of our collaborators, 13 of our 17 focus universities now have at least one funded organizer (compared to 6 last year).

7 universities are participating in a pilot program to support early-stage university groups outside of our focus universities.

We’ve also been talking a lot more with recipients of community building grants, and with other full-time community builders. We should have spent more time on this sooner: we think that these community builders are doing vital, challenging work, and they have a lot of important expertise. We’ve learned a lot from talking with them, and it’s also caused us to reflect on how we could improve our advice, logistical and financial support, and communications. We’re working with them to implement some of these improvements.

University Groups

Support calls

We had over 100 support calls with focus university group organizers this quarter (beyond the broad groups calls mentioned below).

Grants to focus universities

13 out of 17 focus university groups[2] now have funding for a part-time or full-time organizer in the 2021-2022 school year (compared to 6 groups in 2020-2021). This impact shouldn’t just be attributed to CEA (e.g. we think that the Student Careers Team also encouraged people to apply to these programs).

The majority of the new CBGs are part-time, but we think they’ve led to folks spending more time on their groups, and we expect these part-time roles to work well as a pipeline towards full-time roles.

We approved 22 Community Building Grants applications (CBGs), for a total of 6.65 FTEs for at least the fall term of this school year.

Cambridge: 1 FTE (1 person)

Berkeley: 0.9 FTE (3 people total)

Columbia: 0.75 FTE (4 people total)

Harvard: 0.625 FTE (2 people total)

LSE: 0.5 FTE (2 people total)

MIT Impactful Careers Society: 0.5 FTE (1 person)

UPenn: 0.5 FTE (1 person)

Yale: 0.45 FTE (2 people total)

MIT: 0.375 FTE (2 people total)

Stanford: 0.3 FTE (1 person)

Brown: 0.25 FTE (1 person)

Georgetown: 0.25 FTE (1 person)

Harvard Law School: 0.25 FTE (1 person)

Scalable university support

Jessica McCurdy, a former organizer of EA Yale, joined CEA to build out a program that can support many EA university groups at scale.

The goal of this program is to develop a scalable process to help 2-3 volunteer group organizers, from any university, to create a new group and get it off to a strong start in its first semester (through events like club fair tabling, intro presentations, and an intro fellowship). This program provides resource templates, training, calls, and funding. 7 groups are currently participating in the pilot program.

Retreats/programs

We ran three programs this summer to increase the number of CBG appli...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Many groups metrics have grown by 100% to 400% in the past year, published by JoanGass on November 3, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

For CEA's Q3 update, we're sharing multiple posts on different aspects of our work.

We help EA group organizers by advising them, providing resources and funding, and creating online spaces where they can share resources and support each other. The following overview describes support we provide across university groups, city/national groups, and our virtual programs platform.

Some highlights:

We did more support calls this quarter than we did in the whole of last year.

We estimate that around 970 people started an 8-week fellowship (virtual or in-person) related to effective altruism this quarter. This compares to 184 for the same period last year.[1] This 5x growth is partly (but not wholly) due to our additional support for groups generally, for fellowships in particular, and for virtual programs.

We tested out retreats and remote summer training programs to help us identify and train potential full-time organizers at focus universities.

Due to this, as well as the efforts of our collaborators, 13 of our 17 focus universities now have at least one funded organizer (compared to 6 last year).

7 universities are participating in a pilot program to support early-stage university groups outside of our focus universities.

We’ve also been talking a lot more with recipients of community building grants, and with other full-time community builders. We should have spent more time on this sooner: we think that these community builders are doing vital, challenging work, and they have a lot of important expertise. We’ve learned a lot from talking with them, and it’s also caused us to reflect on how we could improve our advice, logistical and financial support, and communications. We’re working with them to implement some of these improvements.

University Groups

Support calls

We had over 100 support calls with focus university group organizers this quarter (beyond the broad groups calls mentioned below).

Grants to focus universities

13 out of 17 focus university groups[2] now have funding for a part-time or full-time organizer in the 2021-2022 school year (compared to 6 groups in 2020-2021). This impact shouldn’t just be attributed to CEA (e.g. we think that the Student Careers Team also encouraged people to apply to these programs).

The majority of the new CBGs are part-time, but we think they’ve led to folks spending more time on their groups, and we expect these part-time roles to work well as a pipeline towards full-time roles.

We approved 22 Community Building Grants applications (CBGs), for a total of 6.65 FTEs for at least the fall term of this school year.

Cambridge: 1 FTE (1 person)

Berkeley: 0.9 FTE (3 people total)

Columbia: 0.75 FTE (4 people total)

Harvard: 0.625 FTE (2 people total)

LSE: 0.5 FTE (2 people total)

MIT Impactful Careers Society: 0.5 FTE (1 person)

UPenn: 0.5 FTE (1 person)

Yale: 0.45 FTE (2 people total)

MIT: 0.375 FTE (2 people total)

Stanford: 0.3 FTE (1 person)

Brown: 0.25 FTE (1 person)

Georgetown: 0.25 FTE (1 person)

Harvard Law School: 0.25 FTE (1 person)

Scalable university support

Jessica McCurdy, a former organizer of EA Yale, joined CEA to build out a program that can support many EA university groups at scale.

The goal of this program is to develop a scalable process to help 2-3 volunteer group organizers, from any university, to create a new group and get it off to a strong start in its first semester (through events like club fair tabling, intro presentations, and an intro fellowship). This program provides resource templates, training, calls, and funding. 7 groups are currently participating in the pilot program.

Retreats/programs

We ran three programs this summer to increase the number of CBG appli...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: CEA’s events team: capacity building and mistakes, published by Amy Labenz on November 3, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

For CEA's Q3 update, we're sharing multiple posts on different aspects of our work.

This post was written before EA Global: London 2021, and refers to that event in future tense.

Events enable attendees to make new connections, learn about core concepts, share and discuss new research, and coordinate on projects.

In summary:

We put a lot of effort into building up our team.

We ran two well-received medium-sized events.

We made some significant mistakes with one of these events, which means that the counterfactual impact might have been negative. We plan to reflect on this after EA Global is complete, and we expect to make significant changes to address this.

In the past few weeks (as of 10/26/21), we’ve managed to roughly double the capacity of EA Global: London, in response to an unexpectedly high number of very strong applications. We’re currently focused on this event.

Depending on how EA Global: London goes, we expect to increase the total number of new connections (our key metric) relative to previous years. Optimistically, we might double the number of connections relative to 2019 (though the increase will likely be somewhat lower).

Metric: connections

Past surveys (e.g. Open Phil’s survey) suggest that connections between individuals are the key source of impact from our events. So we focus on the number of new connections we make at our events.

Currently, we calculate this as follows: number of attendees x average number of self-reported new connections. We define a new connection as “someone you feel comfortable reaching out to to ask for a favor”, so this is a relatively high bar. We expect that this is an overestimate, since people who engage a lot with the event are more likely to fill in our post-event survey, and also more likely to make lots of connections. However, we think it allows for some comparison between events and years.

We’re currently working on fine-tuning this metric, finding better ways of measuring it, and thinking through other important outcomes to consider for measuring event outcomes.

Broadly, we think that we’re on track to nearly double new connections compared to 2019. This would be a slight increase from 2020. However, we think this methodology somewhat overestimates growth relative to 2019, and underestimates growth relative to 2020:

We think this methodology overestimates the number of connections at virtual events relative to in-person events[1]; all events in 2020 were virtual, and some events in 2021 were virtual, while all 2019 events were in-person.

2020 figures include EAGx, whereas 2019 and 2021 figures don’t.

See footnote #2 for details on how we came up with our "projected" figure.[2]

Staffing

Overall, we’re currently in a transition period for the team: we’ve made some very strong hires who we are now onboarding, or who are joining later this year. During this onboarding process, we’re still understaffed. But we think the team will be stronger in about 6 months.

Additionally, Amy is transitioning from a role focused on direct work on events to a role more purely focused on management, with support from Max (Executive Director).

We hired.

Lizka Vaintrob for the Events Generalist role: we expect her to focus on communications and help out with impact analysis.

Ollie Base as our Community Events Manager. He will help us to develop our overall events portfolio, with a particular focus on expanding our community-led events.

Pat Magcalas as a Personal Assistant for Amy Labenz at the start of October.

Barry Grimes is transitioning to the Happier Lives Institute starting in November. We’re grateful for all of his hard work on events over the past 2.5 years.

We’re working with Anine Andresen (previous...