Epistemic status: I’m pretty sure some version of this could provide value, but I’m not part of one of the teams in charge of supporting university/city groups. This means that I have less insight into this work, and they might have already considered something like what I’m suggesting but decided to prioritise other projects, such as EOSP.
Crossposted on The Field Building Blog's Substack. Subscribe here.
TLDR.:
Organisers have a lot of ops work to do, part of which could be outsourced to a central team, empowering community builders to shift their focus to other activities such as upskilling and running more ambitious projects locally.
The case for scalable course coordination
City and university groups need all the help they can get. They have a lot of projects going on, such as courses, career advice, socials, introductory talks, retreats, reading groups, and more. I don’t think many organisers realise this, but something I wish I could tell them is that they are not “just organising a club”, they are essentially running an early-stage education non-profit. No wonder they can feel overwhelmed by organising these activities next to all the responsibilities they already have.
Therefore groups need all the help they can get. We should not only think about the best ways to provide them with advice, but we could also explore how to relieve some of their operations workload. For example, almost all university groups are running an introductory course, which means the bulk of their time is spent on organising these during the semester. While there are some great guides on how to organise these, I suspect many groups still run into common failure modes or try to reinvent the wheel without realising it.
One way to prevent this is to let groups opt into a “centralized course coordination program”, where most of the ops work of organising intro courses is done by a more experienced operations team. A project called AIS Collab has already been doing something like this for city and university groups and they have hundreds of alumni by now. They have figured out some of the best practices for running joint courses for several groups at a time. Another recent example of course coordination is EA Germany’s latest fellowship being run jointly with CEA’s Virtual Programs, which was specifically motivated to reduce ops workload.
What I think AIS Collab’s groups are missing for now is a team specialised in raising awareness about the courses of individual groups. My impression is that a main bottleneck for groups is getting people into their programs, and digital marketing has been really underutilised in the ecosystem. While marketing would still have to happen on the individual group level, the organisers could benefit a lot from having a team help them set up their digital media ads and show best practices for maintaining their groups’ online presence (but of course I would say that as I run an org that does such work!).
Another reason I would be very excited about a project like this is that I want community builders to have to spend less time on community-building, and more on upskilling themselves and helping their members do the same, as well as running ambitious community building projects that cannot be outsourced to a remote team, such as ML4Good bootcamps.
Finally, experienced community builders will tell you that succession is a notoriously difficult issue. In an ideal world, any time the main organisers move to a new city, you would have someone else stepping up taking over the group’s leadership. Unfortunately, this often does not happen. In some cases, this might be a result of a lack of agency, but in others, I suspect some members would really like to see the group continue, but genuinely don’t have time to take over its leadership. In these cases, they could still opt into the course coordination program and facilitate 1-2 groups, as opposed to having to work +10 hours per week on their group.
Some understandable objections:
Wait, you just said that running a is like running a small non-profit. Doesn’t this experience provide valuable skills to the organisers?
Yes and no. Many of the students doing this work are actually not interested in operations and project management, as they might want to pursue a different career path, such as research. For those that want to upskill in ops, they could still contribute to the joint course coordination effort, and get mentoring from more experienced ops people. Nor do I doubt that the organisers would find plenty of other projects that can not be outsourced, yet those would still enable them to upskill in ops. Imagine if most groups would not only run an intro course every semester but also organise an ARENA program. Of course, organisers who want to have the “raw experience” of running an intro course from scratch also don’t have to opt into the joint effort.
Universities have different semester timelines, wouldn’t this make course coordination impossible?
Not all AIS Collab fellowship groups start in the same week, so there is some wiggle room. That said, I’m sure there is enough variance in semester timelines that just one joint program couldn’t accommodate all groups. The solution to this would be just finding out which universities start their semester roughly at the same time, and run several of these joint coordination projects in parallel. This is more ops work, but it would still save a lot of time overall.
Isn’t there a lot of value in providing in-person courses, as opposed to online ones?
I agree that it’s preferable to have sessions in person, and past iterations of AIS Collab had groups doing that. However, this may come at a price based on your context. If you have an office or can secure rooms at your university for free, that’s great! Not all groups have this option, and paying for room booking can be costly. Most fellowship cohorts are quite small with only a couple of groups, but in my experience coordinating in-person sessions can become complicated if you have 6+ groups running in parallel. We are happy for groups to hold in-person sessions, and we think they can still benefit from joining the initiative.
Isn't this a bit overreaching, especially in the case of university clubs?
Perhaps. I think the benefits outweigh the risks in optics, not to mention that those who have a problem with EA/AIS university groups will find other reasons to dislike them anyway. Many of these local clubs need to compete for attention with wealthy organisations such as McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Google, Amazon and alike, so any (additional) resources that would be spent on supporting them pales in comparison to the time and money the for-profit world spends on talent recruitment.
Why not have groups like CEA’s Virtual Programs, or Bluedot do this?
I think they could consider doing this, but I'm not CEA or Bluedot and don’t want to tell them what they should prioritise! IIRC Bluedot was thinking about doing some version of this eventually, but it likely won’t happen in 2025. CEA has done this with EA Germany, but I’m not sure if they are planning their scope further. If what this project achieves is to prove to concept and have more established organisations use it in some form later, I think that’s great.
Conclusion & call to action
I think this could be worth trying, as it is a scalable way to support (university) groups. We have already seen this in the case of AIS Collab and the CEA VP - EA Germany coordination.
AI Safety Collab is planning to run such a coordination effort again for the next semester, if you would like to join the initiative, you can read this announcement post.
We will soon share information about a project called Scaling Altruism, which is going to be running something like this but for EA intro courses. I will update the relevant links here. (Update: Link here)
At a meta level, BlueDot would be open to people suggesting what they think would be good for us to do more directly to us! (Although we don't commit to actually doing it).
As for BlueDot's plans, I'd say:
This is likely to involve thinking through which external (to BlueDot) actors we should be supporting more, and being more intentional about our collaborations. This could very well involve much more local group support (although precise details haven't been worked out yet).
Some directions outside facilitated educational programs we've been considering include:
Thanks for mentioning all of these! Bluedot has put out so much awesome stuff for the broader fieldbuilding community!
Could you expand on this a bit more? This is basically the main crux for us to be running this kind of program, or at least for including groups who would otherwise be able to put up their own courses. Can you think of some specific failure modes that we should be mindful of?
I'd also be keen to hear more about this!
I think there might be two things here:
Customisation is hard and (groups think it is) necessary: Groups want something weird or custom about their courses (their own facilitators for just their group, in-person groups, different readings, translated content etc.). This is always true, because if they were okay with something standard their members could just take our standard courses.
(FWIW I think most customisations that groups want are probably not necessary, but people behave like they are critical blockers. Most group leaders should probably think more carefully about the time trade-offs of getting more things 80% right rather than few things 99% right. Quality is not the goal. I don't think this philosophy works everywhere, but for (especially informal) group organization where stuff is bound to get dropped anyway it seems fair to accept.)
This customisation usually meant having to communicate and manage this. And there would be ongoing coordination overhead - inevitably a facilitator gets ill occasionally, or a room isn't available, or people haven't done the readings and want to reschedule. And then for each of these events there's some extra coordination layer added for the group. We automated more of this over time, but it's still always clunky if say a facilitator is ill at short notice and we need to find a substitute.
I'm not quite sure what the lessons are here. I think if I was to try to support as many groups with ops support now I might try (moderate confidence, please don't take this as perfectly accurate - I also suspect speaking to many diverse group leads would lead to better insights here):
Thanks for expanding on this, Adam!
I'm not sure I agree with this, as AIS collab has done this kind of coordination before, afaik with relatively universal courses. While they might have a preference for customisation, I think most would be willing to compromise for the benefits they get in return, especially if they weren't able to put on their own course otherwise. Whether to let groups who participate do in person sessions is something I'm indeed uncertain about though. For groups that feel very strongly about customization, it is better to just run their own version.
I agree with this and essentially everything else you have shared in the rest of the comment.