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.

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. 

You write that this was 'definitely written by a human', but Pangram flags it as almost entirely AI-generated. I don't know what's going on there, but maybe it would be worth editing if you did in fact write this with AI assistance.

I'm really sorry this happened to you, and I really commend you for standing by yourself and going to court. Taking legal action is stressful, time-consuming, and can be incredibly scary, but I'm glad you did it.

I talked to another one of the organizers of the summer camp, after that part of this incident.  She was upset: she knew Laura, she didn't expect that anything bad would happen if she came to the event, and she wanted to invite her.  But, on the other hand, an authority figure had told her not to, so she didn't.  After all, what if they knew better than she did?  It was the cleanest reproduction of the Milgram experiment that I've ever seen in real life, and it really hurt her.

Now, it's true that the organizer wouldn't have suffered that way if she'd had a little more moral courage, and followed her own views instead of deferring to Community Health.  But this situation should not have required moral courage!  Community organizers should be able to trust that when CH blacklists somebody, it's not an attempt to give a third party leverage in a contract dispute.

The proper response is for local communities to stop paying attention to CEA's recommendations.  I've been told that EA Germany and the summer camp no longer do, and that's great (ETA: I've since had conflicting reports about EA Germany specifically; it has its own dispute resolution process but sometimes takes advice from CEA as well, but wouldn't have in Laura's specific case).  If you're an EA community organizer elsewhere, ask yourself: do you want to be used as a weapon against the people you're organizing?  If not, maybe pay less attention to CEA!  If our people in Germany had followed that heuristic back in 2024, a lot of pointless suffering could have been avoided.