Hey Richard, thanks for starting the discussion! I'd suggest making it easier to submit answers to these questions anonymously e.g. via an anonymous Google Form. I think that will help with opening up the discussion and making the brainstorming more fruitful.

I can't shake the feeling this is a misidentification of the problem. I feel like people have been writing for years about how to make communities more diverse, inclusive, and safer for the people in them. The problem is not a lack of ideas that needs to be rectified by brainstorming - we have the information already. The problem seems to be that no one wants to act on this information. 

I don't know what kind of norm has yet to be stated that would convince people it's bad to have an expert panel that's just 5 white guys. I don't know what kind of "norm" I need to explicitly articulate to make it clear that it's not okay to come to a discussion of gender relations in EA and, as a man, open the discussion by asking how to hit on girls without it being creepy. 

I get the feeling everyone wants to pay lip service to these values without actually addressing the problem (thus the great karma on this post with no comments actually replying to the content of it [although I also agree, in line with Vaidehi and a great Cards Against Humanity card, that Hell will freeze over before we have a sane and respectful discussion of gender and race on the internet]). But the problem is behavior. The behavior simply needs to change. We are past brainstorming. Stop doing the things that make EA spaces hard to be in. 

I think this topic is very important and your question prompts are great, and agree that wider community could maybe do more. I'm skeptical that much progress can be made via online community discussion.

This topic involves are sensitive, complicated and often there won't be a obviously right answer (especially around norms).

My guess is that a dedicated person or small team would be needed to collect experiences (whether via surveys, interviews etc), consult with experts on best practices and then get buy in from relevant stakeholders (e.g ea orgs or groups) and work with them (possibly in a pretty hands on way) to test and implement norm changes.

We can't take on everyone who applies so we are not the whole answer but I as an individual am always happy to chat with people from underrepresented groups Magnify Mentoring the organization continues to take on hundreds of people (currently women, non-binary and trans people of all genders) for mentoring per 6-months which we will continue doing as long as the average results continue to support such an initiative (which thus far they do). We welcome support and as an individual and possibly as an organization, I welcome the opportunity to support efforts and further productive attention in this space.  Thanks :)

Here's a concrete suggestion: less emphasis on a person's impact in "interpersonal harm" cases.

2 of the 7 rows in the table on the community health team post on this topic are about making sure that we can still get the value of perpetrator's work.

This seems to me to be the sort of naive consequentialist reasoning that people find so offputting about EA. It seems to me that when a perpetrator commits a wrongdoing, the question to ask isn't "do they do work that we value and want more of". The questions are "did they commit a wrong? what sort of wrong? what is the appropriate response to that wrongdoing?".

(And note that my link is to an official statement from the team explicitly dedicated to helping protect the community. Imagine how much more prevalent the attitude of "focus on impact" is in some less cautious corners of the community.)

Thanks for starting this discussion!

Some previous efforts here:

The community health team has done some more in-depth work, for example interviews about women's experiences in a couple of workspaces. Unfortunately, the in-depth work didn't yield that many useful next steps. (I’m sure this varies, and in some cases in-depth study of what’s going on with the culture in a space would yield useful action points.)

And more general thoughts:

• EA is multifaceted, made of thousands of people in different online spaces, workplaces, cities, and countries. Even understanding the culture(s), let alone shaping the whole thing, is a huge task. 
• All of us bring pre-existing expectations from our universities, friend groups, workplaces, etc, so there’s no static EA culture - there’s constant inflow from other cultures.
• The work of shaping culture is usually best done by people who understand their space well (their workplace, local group, etc) rather than an outside entity. The staff at CEA can provide advice and support, but we certainly can’t single-handedly change the culture of all these EA spaces.

Just to flag in some ways it would be good to be less inclusive. There is a lot of discussion right now about how/if/when we could have spotted the FTX/crypto fraud sooner and that is all about being quicker to exclude them.

To engage more productively with the prompt, I think the de-normalisation of Polygamy seems plausible. I've long been uncomfortable with (some) EA's embrace of this, as given the harmful effects of the institution on societies, like encouraging male violence and suppressing womens rights. Even though these issues didn't seem like huge issues for EAs, I don't think we should adopt norms that would be bad for society if everyone did them. But there seem to be also two significant more concrete inclusion reasons to oppose it.

Firstly, it enables predatory men and abuses of power. In a traditional environment, all the senior men will be married, and thus any proposition they make to vulnerable young women is clearly illicit. It can still happen - though probably with lower frequency - but the woman will clearly understand from the beginning that a norms violation is occurring, and there is more support for shutting it down sooner. Additionally, to the extent the lead... (read more)

[ETA: Whoops, realized this is answering a different question than the one the poster actually asked -- they wanted to know what individual community members can do, which I don't address here.]

Some concrete suggestions:

-Mandatory trainings for community organizers. This idea is lifted directly from academia, which often mandates trainings of this sort. The professional versions are often quite dumb and involve really annoying unskippable videos; I think a non-dumb EA version would encourage the community organizer to read the content of the community health guide linked in the above post and then require them to pass a quiz about its contents (but if they can pass the quiz without reading the guide that's fine, the point is to check they understand the contents of the guide, not to make them read it). I imagine that better but higher-effort/more costly versions of this test would involve short answer questions ("How would you respond to X situation?"); less useful but lower-effort versions would involve multiple choice questions. To elaborate, the short answers version forces people to think more about their answer but also probably requires a team of people to read all these answ... (read more)

Great post! I agree with a commenter above who says that "The problem is not a lack of ideas that needs to be rectified by brainstorming - we have the information already. The problem seems to be that no one wants to act on this information." That being said, I have a few thoughts: 

Regarding code of conduct at events, I'm hesitant to make hard and fast rules here. I think the reality around situations such as asking people out/hitting on people, etc, is that some people are better at reading situations than others. For example, I know couples who have... (read more)

"interpersonal harm" link broken