If you're an EA community organiser, you are also most welcome to contact me (Catherine from CEA's Community Health team) if you've got any questions or concerns about the potential impact of this series on your local community. Our team might be able to brainstorm ideas with you and provide some advice.   

Good push back Hazem!

Definitely some in the https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups are inactive, but there are also groups that haven't put their details on this page, so it is hard to know. But on reflection my 
> maybe a couple hundred EA University groups
is probably on the high side!

Some other numbers we know
- CEA currently has 72 university groups in the Organiser Support Program (the team are interviewing new organisers right now, so this number will probably increase soon) 
-  I was mostly anchored on the last time CEA did a detailed group census - and 200 uni groups was the ball park then. But now I look at it this was back in Dec 2022 so my anchor is really out of date. 
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aetatCMGqcAPsNbLs/growth-and-engagement-in-ea-groups-2022-groups-census

299 EA groups [...] indicated that they are active.

Out of the active surveyed groups 150 were university groups and 25 were university/city hybrid groups. 

Based on our records, we estimate that ~63 active EA groups (17% of all active EA groups) did not complete the census.

Hi Hazem, I'm Catherine from CEA (and a former group organiser).  

I think is it really great idea to give LLMs context about running EA groups generally, and about your own EA group. 
And thanks for linking to CEA's Organiser Support Programme!

I just wanted to correct one thing:

apparently, there are currently only seven "established" EA uni groups (established means very active if I understand correctly)

I believe there are maybe a couple hundred EA University groups around the world and CEA has has supported dozens of these groups in the last year (sorry I don't have accurate numbers at my fingertips!). The website you linked is just the group supported by the NEST programme. There is no good up to date list of active groups, but  this https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups  has a lot of groups - some active some dormant. 

But I agree with the point you made that

Too often, uni groups die

and that succession planning is important. And LLMs could help with that a lot!

I'd really like it if AI resulted in amazing plant based or cultured meat, and that the general abundance coming from AI means that people can focus their thinking on morality, not just making their lives go okay. 

BUT, so far, new tech and improved economical situations have caused farmed animal suffering to get worse.

So I have a big uncertainty, but lean disagree. 
 

Hi Yarrow, thanks for looping back on this. 
Yes, we did do this project, which involved looking at existing data and doing some new interviews with community members, and looked at existing literature on women and non-binary people's experiences in different communities, and what seems to improve things. Based on all this, we wrote an extended internal document, and shared some recommendations with a variety of EA organisations and EA groups. We think this information could be of use to more community members, but for some bureaucratic reasons a writeup hasn't made it on to the Forum - sorry about that. 

What a great spreadsheet. It gives me wonderful old-school EA vibes. 
Do you have a fav seitan recipe? 

I've made seitan 3 times. 1x failure, 1x fairly good, 1x amazing but really time consuming. 

Correct! It is a great book!

I look back fondly to 10 years ago at EA Global: Melbourne. It was small, simple, the catering was (literally) carrot sticks, corn chips and hummus, and it hugely influential to me. I knew no one before I arrived, but the conference photo shows many people I've gone on to work with and become close friends with. 

This talk was a highlight - I remember it bending my mind in ways it hadn't been bent before, and it hammered home just how hard our mission to improve the world actually is: 

The counterfactual attendances at EA conferences is a pretty interesting metric (at least for us at CEA) - I'm glad you're tracking that. 

Great to hear of all your progress over 2024 Gergő and Milán!

(And thanks for the thanks! In retrospect I think those initial meetings with EA Hungary might have been among my most useful meetings with group organisers!)

I'm thrilled to have an EA conference in my home town (thanks @Gavin Bishop 🔹 and @Ruben Castaing for leading this event)!

For those of you who are considering coming -- a little (biased) plug from me:

The EA Christchurch and the EA Aotearoa New Zealand communities have been active for 10 years now, with a handful of very engaged EAs who have dedicated their careers to EA-aligned work of various types (community building, donation funnelling, civilisational resilience, AI safety, animal advocacy, probably other things too that I've forgotten), and many other engaged EAs have been involved in the past and have flown the coop for their high-impact careers. While our community is small in global standards I think we are pretty impressive by per-capita and by per-unit of resources invested. And we're very friendly and supportive too! So it would be lovely to see people join us!

While the conference is just a single day, a few of us are planning to also have some more relaxed social activities on Friday night and Sunday, so try to come for the whole weekend if you can. 

Nau mai, haere mai!