Announcing plans for a German Effective Altruism Network focused on Community Building

Alexander Herwix 🔸

Announcing plans for a German Effective Altruism Network focused on Community Building

Alexander Herwix 🔸

15 min readJul 3, 2019

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tobiaspulver

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, facilitating coordination and exchange among local groups has often seemed valuable to me in the past.

At the same time, I'd caution against providing too many services too soon. My skepticism is grounded mainly in my experience that local groups often don't use tools offered to them--like a CRM or a website-- reliably. This is in part because turnover is usually high and non-essential things often don't get handed over, and in part because motivation and available time tends to fluctuate strongly. (On a side note: This may be hard, but ideally such effects are also taken into account when surveying groups about their needs.) I've often seen groups drop things after an initial burst of motivation and interest. This can have negative effects if they would counterfactually have focused more on more key aspects of local group management.

For these reasons I'd recommend using an iterative approach, focusing initially on the provision of fairly basic infrastructure and a small number of key events. If this goes well and you have more capacitiy and notice more demand, you can expand your activities step-by-step.

With respect to the idea of an introductory workshop series, and perhaps also relevant to other planned activities: I've become less optimistic about proactive outreach efforts by local groups since I wrote down my toughts on running a local group a little over a year ago (link). In particular, I probably wouldn't endorse several of the recommendations I made in the 'Outreach' section anymore, as well as the idea of running an 'EA seminar' for new members. With respect to the seminar/workshop series, I've become less sure about the value of efforts trying to "teach" EA ideas to potentially interested people. People who are a good fit for a group in the long run are often those who also have sufficient motivation to read about and engage with relevant ideas on their own. I'm not highly confident in this, though, and people who have themselves run such seminars are be in a better position to evaluate their value.

Alexander Herwix 🔸

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 and how to move forward from here. I can't answer comprehensively in this comment, but it is delightful topic for a set of good conversations or even a series of blog posts ;)

I hope I could answer some of your concerns. If something needs further exploration, I am happy to try again :)

Chris Leong

What's EAF focusing on now and why did it decide to deprioritise community building?

tobiaspulver

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.

Jonas_

Thanks for this detailed write-up! I appreciate that you're taking the initiative, especially considering that EAF has withdrawn from this area.

A few questions / inputs:

1. Have you considered trying to recruit a more demographically diverse team? To my knowledge, there are several women who would make excellent contributions and might be interested.

2. What are your plans for coordinating with the international EA community, especially CEA, and staying up to date with their inputs for community building strategy? My experience has been that important strategic update are often only propagated slowly to national/local groups, so having a very deliberate plan for doing that seems desirable (edit: you also write this in your post – sorry for the initial oversight). (As far as I know, there hasn't been an attempt to coordinate with EAF yet, which IMO could also be useful. Feel free to reach out if you haven't yet! – Edit: I stand corrected – there has actually been some coordination in the early stages, so thanks!)

3. I appreciate that you listed concrete metrics to evaluate your impact. Some of the metrics seem much more suitable to me than others – career changes, for example, seem really valuable and impactful, pledges taken seems useful, but money donated by students is unlikely to be significant and can be used as a way of getting people involved and engaged rather than as an outcome metric. Similarly, I'd recommend a stronger effort to track the quality of local groups and local group members rather than the quantities/numbers. These things have been elaborated on in several local group guides.

Alexander Herwix 🔸

Dear Jonas,

thank you for your comment and inputs :) I am responding from my personal perspective and may not represent the full team.

That's a great point! We would love to have a more diverse team and if you have interested people in mind, please direct them to the survey or our current email address: [email protected]. We are actively looking for new members and generally don't plan to have any limit on members if they fulfill some EA and CB related criteria. Thus, hopefully we will be more diverse soon :)
As you mention there has been some coordination with the big players (CEA, EAF, LEAN) but it could obviously always be more and is generally limited by the time that we get from them. We also tried to coordinate with some community builders in Germany but have to say that we are rooted in a mostly regional phenomenon of cooperating local groups that has been slowly spreading from NRW. At the moment, we are trying to onboard and integrate the (interested) rest of Germany.
The list is just a short list of some concrete things that we can measure. We are very much engaged with the question of how to track and improve quality in community building and over time this will hopefully become one of our key value propositions – that we are able to assess and advise what is likely to work in a given context. This is why we have added a special role for quality management.

I hope this answers the most relevant parts of your question. I am happy to elaborate in more detail if necessary :)

Jonas_

We would love to have a more diverse team and if you have interested people in mind, please direct them to the survey or our current email address

I've sent you a PM with some suggestions! I haven't been in touch with them lately, so please reach out to them directly.

Aaron Gertler 🔸

Thanks for writing this up! It's nice to see a detailed plan and cost estimates ahead of time for the kind of community-building project that is often treated more informally.

A couple of notes/questions:

I may have missed this, but are you modeling the proposed organization of your network after any of the other national-level EA groups? It seems like there should be many lessons to learn, but I didn't see any explicit mention of groups you're emulating or groups you've spoken to.

I'm especially curious about this in regards to the IT infrastructure section of the proposal; it can be difficult to set up and maintain websites that require participation/input from many different groups, and I wonder how much of the event information could be handled with off-the-shelf tools (as you plan to use for your CRM software).

You have a lot of different projects and priorities. If this project were to be funded, what would you do first?
To what extent do you believe that EA movement growth in Germany has been hampered by a lack of coordination?

You mention that the population density of EAs is lower there than in the UK or Norway; I'm not sure how much of this is based on difficulty retaining members vs. difficulty reaching people in the first place. A coordination system seems especially helpful for retention (as interacting with a badly-run group is a really easy way for someone to lose involvement with EA), but I'm less clear on how much it would help with outreach.

----

i work for CEA, but these views are my own.

Michelle_Hutchinson

As Aaron says, it seems that the team is doing a great job of forming a thorough and considered plan. Have you thought much about what a minimum viable product (as described eg in the Lean Start-up) would look like, and how to use that to test your assumptions? That might be particularly useful given the complexity of the project.

Alexander Herwix 🔸

Dear Michelle, thank you for the kind words. I am answering from my own perspective and may not represent the full team.

We are basically already running as an MVP for ~3 month now while putting this plan together. It's just a core team of people, coordinating and organizing events and working on a common infrastructure. We document quite a lot of what we do internally but it is not (yet) really accessible to people on the outside that's why we aim to publish more blog posts like this in the future. We have a great team and despite limited resources I am constantly amazed by what we can pull together :)

We are also executing towards additional layers of functionality as we speak. For example, we have launched a survey to test some of our core assumptions and will conduct a series of open workshops focused on developing GEAN further (first one is this weekend). In terms of organizational structure we are trying to stay lean but will have to take the plunge of incorporating as this is one of the very reasons that we are embarking on this project at all – just based on our own (limited) activities we already have the need for a proper legal set up.

I hope this answers at least a substantial part of your question :)

Alexander Herwix 🔸

Dear Aaron, thanks for taking the time to comment. I will answer your points quickly from my personal perspective, however, we will also collect all feedback to discuss it in the team as well which we may then collectively discuss in a future post or comment.

We are modeling after many different resources that we have access to (e.g., CEA thinking, posts on the EA forum, some personal conversations, personal experience and last but not least academic literature). For the sake of conveying „what we want to do“ and „why we want to do it“ rather than „why we want to do it the way we want to do“, we decided to not make this an academic paper but a more informal business plan. But if there is general interest in the whys we can write up a more academic exposition soon. We also really want to get in the habit of writing up our reasoning early and often... thus, thanks for providing some initiative ;)

Regarding IT infrastructure. We are not yet set on a specific tool or set of tools but are currently investigating different alternatives. Rest assured, we are very diligent at this task and really take a lot of care to find (or even develop) solutions that satisfy our (and the communities) requirements. For example, we are working on separate posts to justify and outline some of the values that guide our decisions here. However, while we have a great team with IT experience, we are somewhat bound by our financial situation and priorities. We may need to start with of the shelf components but migrate as we gain stability and resources.

This is a great point! Yes, we are ambitious and there is much to do! We are generally working on this on a volunteer basis at the moment which works out well to organize workshops and smaller events. However, setting up and running the legal and organizational infrastructure for an organization such as the one we outline in the business plan is better handled by one or two people working on this in at least part-time (better full-time) capacity. Thus, we would likely invest in funding appropriate people to be able to execute at an accelerated but sustainable pace. I hope this answer is precise enough, if not, I am happy to elaborate in more detail.
Based on my personal experience, I believe that there is a strong demand for coordination which is evident in the diverse team that we have already assembled. These are all people who value the exchange with other local groups and are motivated by working together in something larger than their local groups. Regarding movement growth, I believe that having „fun but valuable things to do“ besides reading, discussions and skill building will attract more people to community building activities, which in turn will make the reading, discussing and skill building more attractive. To grow sustainably there needs to be a self-supporting ecology of opportunities that fits to the local resource distribution.

Regarding outreach, I believe that I have covered the gist of it in my previous paragraph. Content-wise we are working on formats that are highly self-supporting, scalable and transferable to different regional contexts. While this is not an outreach activity per se, it‘s about setting up the infrastructure to be able to scale once momentum is there. I would hope to mainly use word of mouth to scale organically over time.

I think one of the main points that differentiates EA from other movements like F4F is that we want to have a better sense of what we are doing rather than just winging it. That‘s what we are working on and I thank you for helping us reflect more on this :)

DavidNash

I think that this is a good plan and it would be interesting to hear if there have been any updates in the last 4 months.

I agree with a lot of the other comments but one thing I haven't noticed is how to provide value to the wider network of people in Germany who have an interest in EA but may not want to go to events or become heavily engaged.

Jørgen Ljønes🔸

Sorry we're late to reply, but we hope it's still valuable.

Thanks for our detailed post and willingness to be transparent about our plans! Regional and national EA groups in Germany seems like potentially a very valuable initiative.

Based on our experience building the national EA group in Norway, we want to echo the feedback previously given here by EAF, Michelle and Aaron. Especially the notion of not planning too much in advance, as reality will always be merciless to any plans. Adopting an agile approach with rapid feedback cycles is really important. We've found much of the advice in the Startup Playbook (Y Combinator) really useful: https://playbook.samaltman.com/

Here's a relevant extract from their chapter about great products:

"Understand your users as well as you possibly can. Really figure out what they need, where to find them, and what makes them tick.

“Do things that don’t scale” has rightfully become a mantra for startups. You usually need to recruit initial users one at a time (Ben Silbermann used to approach strangers in coffee shops in Palo Alto and ask them to try Pinterest) and then build things they ask for. Many founders hate this part, and just want to announce their product in the press. But that almost never works. Recruit users manually, and make the product so good the users you recruit tell their friends.

You also need to break things into very small pieces, and iterate and adapt as you go. Don’t try to plan too far out, and definitely don’t batch everything into one big public release. You want to start with something very simple—as little surface area as possible—and launch it sooner than you’d think. In fact, simplicity is always good, and you should always keep your product and company as simple as possible."

May be it's a good idea to select just a few of the activities you mention, starting with North Rhine-Westphalia or Greater Berlin before expanding? NRW is 18 million people, about the size of Sweden, Norway and Denmark combined.

We would very much be interested in discussing EA community building and new regional and national groups further. We regularly collaborate and share experience and best practices with other EA groups so please don't hesitate to reach out.

Alexander Herwix 🔸

Dear Jorgen,

thank you for your feedback! Given our background we are very familiar with start ups, agile planning, etc. So rest assured, we are not going to blindly follow a plan when evidence emerges that indicates that we need to adjust. Interestingly, our plans seem to hold up quite well for the time being but I can understand that a single post here makes it difficult to get a complete understanding of our plans and how we are going to execute (which is not really part of this post anyhow) – so I understand your concerns.

What would be really interesting to me, is if you have additional concrete aspects to criticize. For example, is there something you want to critique substantively in terms of "this is not a good idea because of reason x, y, z" or "your logic here is flawed"? We are always looking for insightful feedback and concerns we didn't know or prioritize before.

I am happy to talk and will write you an email to set something up.

Comments

Alexander Herwix 🔸

We are modeling after many different resources that we have access to (e.g., CEA thinking, posts on the EA forum, some personal conversations, personal experience and last but not least academic literature). For the sake of conveying „what we want to do“ and „why we want to do it“ rather than „why we want to do it the way we want to do“, we decided to not make this an academic paper but a more informal business plan. But if there is general interest in the whys we can write up a more academic exposition soon. We also really want to get in the habit of writing up our reasoning early and often... thus, thanks for providing some initiative ;)

Regarding IT infrastructure. We are not yet set on a specific tool or set of tools but are currently investigating different alternatives. Rest assured, we are very diligent at this task and really take a lot of care to find (or even develop) solutions that satisfy our (and the communities) requirements. For example, we are working on separate posts to justify and outline some of the values that guide our decisions here. However, while we have a great team with IT experience, we are somewhat bound by our financial situation and priorities. We may need to start with of the shelf components but migrate as we gain stability and resources.

This is a great point! Yes, we are ambitious and there is much to do! We are generally working on this on a volunteer basis at the moment which works out well to organize workshops and smaller events. However, setting up and running the legal and organizational infrastructure for an organization such as the one we outline in the business plan is better handled by one or two people working on this in at least part-time (better full-time) capacity. Thus, we would likely invest in funding appropriate people to be able to execute at an accelerated but sustainable pace. I hope this answer is precise enough, if not, I am happy to elaborate in more detail.
Based on my personal experience, I believe that there is a strong demand for coordination which is evident in the diverse team that we have already assembled. These are all people who value the exchange with other local groups and are motivated by working together in something larger than their local groups. Regarding movement growth, I believe that having „fun but valuable things to do“ besides reading, discussions and skill building will attract more people to community building activities, which in turn will make the reading, discussing and skill building more attractive. To grow sustainably there needs to be a self-supporting ecology of opportunities that fits to the local resource distribution.

Regarding outreach, I believe that I have covered the gist of it in my previous paragraph. Content-wise we are working on formats that are highly self-supporting, scalable and transferable to different regional contexts. While this is not an outreach activity per se, it‘s about setting up the infrastructure to be able to scale once momentum is there. I would hope to mainly use word of mouth to scale organically over time.

Announcing plans for a German Effective Altruism Network focused on Community Building

Announcing plans for a German Effective Altruism Network focused on Community Building

Problem

Solution

Pooling Resources

Coordinating a Structured Knowledge Exchange

Why Now?

Market Potential

Competition / Alternatives

Governance Model

Business Model

Team

Financials

References