In a chat about forecasting important values/proxy measures for EA groups (e.g. dollars of CEA grant funding, number of projects taken on by contributing members), Justin Otto came up with a question/suggestion that I found interesting, provocative, and potentially useful.
Could an EA group tape or otherwise record one of their meetups or other regular EA community building activities and then send it to other aspiring EAs who could give feedback?
(This was inspired by some martial arts dojos which apparently, when they are just getting started or trying to improve, record their lessons and then get feedback on the lessons from other established instructors.)
Perhaps one-on-ones will still be way better for giving this sort of feedback.
Perhaps there is potential in other methods for finding feedback such as recording and sharing past events, effort, and reports with other aspiring EAs.
Have groups done this in the past?
Any suggestions for new partnerships? (in integrations to other community building efforts, e.g. community builders newsletter, FB group, Hub, ???)
This is an interesting idea!
It sounds like this kind of feedback might be harder to give than feedback on a visual/physical activity like martial arts, but some new groups would probably still benefit.
Even if a group's members aren't all open to having a session recorded, it can be valuable to put together "postmortem" writeups on events. Some of my favorite writing about EA groups is on-the-ground reporting from leaders who wanted to improve (e.g. EA Berkeley's retrospectives, EA Yale's fellowship writeup).
Postmortem writeups don't need to be anywhere this detailed, of course; even comments on the level of "someone talked a lot and kept going off-topic, and we couldn't figure out how to handle it gracefully" give groups the opportunity to receive a lot of advice.