No worries! 

Yes, in per capita terms we do pretty well :) But so do Norway, Switzerland, and Estonia. 

I'd suggest having a few 1-1s with people who have been in a similar situation to yourself (or people who can provide an overview of different relevant communities).

@guneyulasturker 🔸 came to Amsterdam from Turkey to do an exchange here (and eventually interned with us) because he thought it'd be a good place to connect with EAs in Europe. I think he was a little disappointed at first - it's not like there's something happening every night of the week - so he can give you a nuanced view. 

Perhaps you could also talk to @mariuswenk? He was interning with EA Switzerland and then chose to spend a few weeks interning with us to see how things vary from place to place. 

Good luck making the decision, and we look forward to welcoming you at EAGxAmsterdam!

Thanks! That might explain your low success rate. Filling out the form is a stronger signal than clicking on the ad, so the algorithm gets a stronger signal about who it should serve the ads to. 

Excellent write-up!

I've two questions about your Meta campaign:

Budget: How much did you spend on Meta ads? For context, our national programme spends roughly €1k per cohort, exclusively on Instagram, which typically increases applications from ~30 to ~100.

Process: What was your application funnel? We use instant forms on the platform that automatically subscribe people to a MailChimp sequence — they then receive a couple of follow-up emails encouraging them to apply.

Not one I know of. It's on my longterm to-do list for EA Netherlands.

I think you’re right about the limitations of these examples, but this feels like we’re getting lost in the weeds. The original point was about travel costs making democratic decision-making processes suboptimal in large countries. These examples show that’s not true - organisations routinely manage democratic processes across large geographies.

I imagine you'd organise it the same way you'd organise any other national democratic organisation in the US - through representative structures, regional chapters, online participation options, and other standard approaches that democratic organisations use to manage scale and geography.

I asked Claude for examples:

The American Medical Association has around 270,000 members across all states and manages democratic governance through state medical societies that send delegates to their annual House of Delegates meeting, plus online voting for leadership positions. Professional engineering societies like IEEE operate similarly with over 400,000 members globally - they use regional sections, online balloting for board elections, and hybrid conferences. Even academic organisations like the American Psychological Association coordinate democratic decision-making across their 120,000+ members through divisional representation and electronic voting systems.

Thank you! 

I'm sure members typically have a suboptimal level of organisational context. However, that might be outweighed by other benefits. I think the more important question is, 'Are there contexts in which democratic decision-making processes improve outcomes?'. I would love it if people could point me to some good research on the subject! 

Edit: after asking Claude to do some research, the best I could find was this.

There is much enthusiasm among scholars and public administrators for participatory and collaborative modes of governance as a means to tackle contemporary environmental problems. Participatory and collaborative approaches are expected to both enhance the environmental standard of the outputs of decision-making processes and improve the implementation of these outputs. In this article, we draw on a database of 305 coded published cases of public environmental decision-making to identify key pathways via which participation fosters effective environmental governance. We develop a conceptual model of the hypothesized relationship between participation, environmental outputs, and implementation, mediated by intermediate (social) outcomes such as social learning or trust building. Testing these assumptions through structural equation modeling and exploratory factor analysis, we find a generally positive effect of participation on the environmental standard of governance outputs, in particular where communication intensity is high and where participants are delegated decision-making power. Moreover, we identify two latent variables—convergence of stakeholder perspectives and stakeholder capacity building—to mediate this relationship. Our findings point to a need for treating complex and multifaceted phenomena such as participation in a nuanced manner, and to pay attention to how particular mechanisms work to foster a range of social outcomes and to secure more environmentally effective outputs and their implementation.

I'm somewhat confused about what led you to this conclusion. I was the co-director of EA Germany for two years, an organization that is similarly structured. When I compare it to the memberless nonprofits where I'm a board member, the overhead for organizing a general assembly has been greater, yet it hasn't resulted in significant decision-making input from the members. 
 

The post's main claim is relatively modest: "you don't need to panic about democracy in EA." Speaking for myself, I contributed to this post because I have the impression that often, when someone suggests increased democratisation, the responses are mostly, "oh, that will never work because of this, that, and the other reason" before moving on. In writing this post, I wanted to update people away from that by providing an example of where democratic elements have worked reasonably well. Nonetheless, I agree that there will be examples of organisations where it doesn't work as well, and maybe EA Germany is one of those organisations.

In the rest of your comment, it feels like you're mainly questioning the value of national community building orgs rather than the value of democratising national community building orgs. That's a reasonable thing to question, but I think it's a separate discussion. Unless I'm misunderstanding you?

I agree!