Comments
Hi Laura,
We know that this has been a difficult experience for you.
I'll give some information publicly here and also send a message privately to you. As you may be aware there are some constraints about what we can share publicly.
I can assure you that our team has reviewed all the information you've sent us very carefully, and taken that information into account. As I’ve previously said to you, we’re open to revisiting our decisions if you have new information to send us.
On the Community Health team’s role
- We listen to and sometimes act upon complaints from the community. Here is the Community Health team’s website if you want to learn more about what we do.
- CEA has the right to admit people (or not) to our private events for a variety of reasons. Nearly all of the time that people are rejected from EAG, it’s because their application doesn't meet the EAG bar in some way. But sometimes we do reject people due to concerns raised by other community members. The EA Global FAQ has got some more information.
- Sometimes we reject people without asking them for their point of view on the concern raised. This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as:
- We don't have permission from people who raised concerns to tell the specifics.
- The concern is sufficiently clear or serious that information from the person is unlikely to change our decision.
- Sometimes there are conflicts between two individuals in the EA space, and we review those situations on a case-by-case basis.
- Most of the time we just advise the people and don’t reject anyone from events.
- Sometimes we reject one person, sometimes both, and occasionally we make arrangements so that the two people involved attend different events.
- We are always open to getting more information. We regularly admit people to conferences who we'd previously rejected, either because of new information or because we feel the downsides of admitting that person have gotten smaller over time.
We’re no longer sharing private information outside of CEA
In the past some EA organisations (including EA groups) could come to us about people they were thinking of giving opportunities to. If we had any information relevant to the opportunity that we had permission from the source to share, we might pass that information on. We no longer do this and we haven't done so for over a year. This sharing was so that community leaders could make more informed decisions about who to give what opportunities to, with the aim of improving the wellbeing and impact of the whole EA community - not just CEA spaces.
We knew it was possible that people may feel pressured to take certain actions because of the information we shared, but we tried to reduce that risk through steps like making it clear that the final decision was theirs. Often we’d offer advice on multiple ways they might handle the situation, like how they might reduce downsides if they did offer the opportunity.
As Laszlo commented, the 2024 EA Germany summer camp organisers chose to give us a list of applicants and we did pass on some information about Laura. We explicitly told the organisers that it was their decision, and that if they chose to go ahead with offering the opportunity, there might be ways to reduce risk and we're available to help brainstorm ideas. But it is very possible that we still made the organisers feel pressured to make a particular decision.
I was the co-organizer of Summer Camp 2024, an independently funded event happening yearly near Berlin, with the purpose of bringing EA community members together to do silly light-hearted activities. As applications rolled in, we sent them to Community Health so that they compare them against their blacklist, with the stipulation that for any matching name we also get a reason why that person is banned. (Again, we were doing this voluntarily – the event was funded 100% from ticket income, and not at all by CEA, therefore applicant filtering was also fully in our control.) Laura's name was flagged, and in a private call with Community Health we were informed that she filed a lawsuit against members of the EA community claiming payment for work that she did not perform, and that her participation at our event is recommended against, lest she gather supporters for her case. Based on this point of view, even though uncertain about the actual events, with our organizer time being limited, we took the (safer) decision to not accept Laura to the event. In the rejection email we did not provide full details on the reasons, as we were told by Community Health that Laura could receive information from them on her case.
In hindsight, I regret this decision, and I wish I had dedicated more time to the case before sending out our rejection letter to Laura without course for appealing.
This seems fairly dubious to me, as grounds to exclude someone. I thought exclusions were supposed to be for someone who was potentially dangerous to others.
If Laura's case is bad, hopefully potential supporters will be able to suss that out. If Laura's case is good, it's good that there's a safeguard by which she can gather supporters.
The idea of trying to "keep the peace" in this kind of hamfisted way seems likely to create more problems than it solves.
Having run lots of events, a sense that someone is going to be a pain is a perfectly reasonable reason to exclude them. I generally like event organisers to be able to invite who they want and not who they don't.
I think "someone filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit" should be kept carefully separate from "someone is a pain" in our social norms, even though people who've filed lawsuits are sometimes annoying to be around even if you're not the one they filed it against. If the penalty for filing a suit is social ostacism, then people are more free to break the terms of the contracts they make, because it's so much more expensive to enforce those contracts than usual.
In EA, where so many of us work for each other, I think this is especially important. People who work together sometimes get into conflicts that require a court to unravel, even if everyone's acting in good faith. So long as the parties can be civil to each other, there's no reason they can't attend the same events in the meantime.
Maybe I should've clarified that I was more talking about the community health team than event organizers. I don't think the community health team should be excluding people based on vibes. I think they should mediate conflicts, and announce their decisions in some cases, but the blacklist should not generally be used as a tool to "resolve" conflicts unless there are additional circumstances beyond just the disagreement itself.
I feel ambivalent about "if someone is going to be a pain is a perfectly reasonable reason to exclude them". Yes, some people can be a pain at events, making the experience worse for many others. That sucks and should be avoided. But if someone is excluded for that reason, it should be made clear why, in a way that doesn’t lump them together with people who’ve done much worse things.
In any case, none of this is relevant to Laura’s case, because she’s a pleasure to be around.
I have been excluded from events and not told why. It sucks. But I feel like explaining to everyone is a big cost. And only explaining to the easy cases makes the hard cases more obvious. In a world where there are too few events (in my view) I would like event organisers to do as they want without me claiming they have broken some big norm.
But I'm sad exclusions happen, then generally suck, especially for those excluded, but sometimes for the organisers too.
But this case is not about an exclusion from some specific event. It’s about a full-on exclusion from CEA events. Other orgs and projects in the ecosystem rely on CEA‘s “blacklist” to guide their admissions. Our Berlin coworking space TEAMWORK checks applicants against that list too. So being on there means many doors will be shut for you and I‘ve historically read it as something like „that person is cancelled in EA (and probably for good reasons)“.
Are you sure this is still true? Caroline claimed above that CEA no longer shares that information.
I think we currently run applications past EA Germany informally (at least for folks we don’t yet know), just asking if they know anything they think we should be aware of. I’d assume that includes CEA info. It’s not something we’re required to do; it just seems like a sensible practice, and one where we always reserve the right to make our own decision.
The problem here is that – judging by the policy Catherine Low described – anyone can have anyone else excluded, which is respected regardless of which party was right. (Unless these rules don't apply to everyone equally, which would be even worse.) Had Laura contacted Community Health before the lawyers, saying that her former employer makes her uncomfortable because they owe her a significant paycheck, maybe her former employer would have been excluded from EA events – but this first-mover advantage is nonsense and is not the recipe for a healthy community.
I generally agree (unless the organizer knows for a fact that the excluded person is spreading lies and is good at it, which was absolutely not the case here). As that in 2024 was the first event I organized that was bigger than a birthday party with nine friends present, I constantly felt in over my head, so I could neither judge everything rationally, nor could I always live up to my values of fairness and truth. (And deferring to authority figures as David explained likely also played a role, especially when their name suggests that they are responsible for a healthy community.)
I'd like to point out that we – as independent organizers – weren't pressured by CH to make this decision, but that doesn't change the fact that a very skewed picture was painted to us by CH, which we took at face value.