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! 

This is cool - thanks for sharing!

Maybe you've already seen this Tom but, if not, the Rethink Priorities team published some findings from testing different framings of EA and longtermism here. The 2024 pulse also has a few interesting reports that may be useful. But I agree, if there's more research it'd be super useful to see it. 

Thanks, Emma! And sorry for the rather curt comment. I typed it out while my phone was dying and I was on the move after a rough start to the day. In hindsight, it came across more strongly than I intended.

I really appreciate the context you shared. To give a bit of background from my side: it’s felt like things are moving quite quickly on CEA’s end with branding and related work (which is exciting!), but from where I sit, it’s sometimes felt like orgs like ours are struggling to keep up. I can’t speak for all community builders, but I usually try to follow CEA’s lead to keep things coherent across the ecosystem — so the lack of engagement has at times felt a little disorienting, and honestly, a bit disempowering.

For example, we’ve recently been putting quite a bit of time and money into revamping our website and visual identity. If we’d known more about what was happening at CEA, it could have helped shape our direction. A short note to CEA's groups team, which could have been forwarded on, would have gone a long way — something like: “Hey, we’re working on EA brand stuff at the moment. It’s being informed by such-and-such findings. Here’s our rough timeline and broad direction. More soon”.

What’s made that feeling a bit more acute is that I’d actually tried to reach out a couple of times to find someone at CEA to talk with about this, but didn’t get a response. I almost certainly didn’t go about it the right way (in hindsight, I probably should’ve just emailed you directly), but that lack of feedback added to the sense of being out of the loop.

That said, I’m really glad to hear about the progress and new capacity on your team, and I’d love to stay in sync however we can. And sorry once again for the abrasive tone of my comment!

I've been thinking about creating an EA Reddit account to contribute to EA-related discussions on there. This has prompted me to get round to it finally.

Great stuff! And thanks for taking the time to share what you’ve done.

Do you know if the team working on the EA brand project would be up for talking with professional community builders? At EA Netherlands we’re working on our brand quite a bit at the moment, and I think a few other national organisations are too. Since national orgs are often the main entry point for EA in their region, I think this should probably be done in coordination with CEA to make sure we’re all aligned. 

To speak frankly, I’m a little surprised professional community builders haven’t been involved in brand work so far. (This comment isn’t addressed to you Agnes, from what I understand it’s not your responsibility to keep brand stakeholders in the loop! Writing it here in case a relevant person reads it).

Again, thanks for this work, it looks great!