Head of Courses at Leaf • Programme Associate at ERA • BlueDot Impact Facilitator • EA Bristol President • Non-Trivial Experienced Facilitator/ Winner • 3rd Year Maths and Philosophy @ Bristol • GWWC 10% Pledger🔸
Â
Thanks for the mention Charlie, I also really like the tone of this post, lots of organisers seem very intimidated by the work ahead of them, so it's lovely seeing encouragement like this! :)
For me it's also giving me the opportunity to create a social space I haven't quite found at uni yet so I hope lots of group organisers have a lot of fun social time through organising rather than it just feeling like work!Â
Yeah, I totally get that and feel similar - I think being in a community is very different to trying to artificially engineer one (e.g. you have to be in a community to build it)
Oh cool, I've used the Gather Town a little and have been building a smaller discord coworking community for some EA Uni Societies which seems like it might be serving a similar goal :)Â
Awesome, thanks for that additional insight. I agree with the potential for these dynamics and will try to be cognisant of them as Bristol kicks off soon!
Ah, awesome. Let me know if you're ever around! And yeah, I know Chris. He's great. He's helping organise this year, so I'm excited for him to be involved.
Ah that's awesome Aaron! I do feel like these social approaches can lead to really cool unexpected outcomes, which I think is harder to achieve with things like fellowships and a more "teachy" approach.Â
I also think this adds to my feeling that the best community builders are... the best at community building, not just the most knowledgeable - good generalist abilities and intuition, prior experience, and strong social skills (approachability, likability, openness, etc.) all feel more important in my mind than a mental index of the forum/ being really brought into the ideas (these things can be helpful, but don't feel nearly as important)Â
Thanks for this Brad, I totally agree!Â
The thing that made utilitarian ethics click for me was the idea that often the problems stem from the proxies for impact rather than the impact itself and that nth order indirect effects of your direct actions should still be factored into the moral calculus of your decisions.Â
I also think a portfolio of proxies is useful in the space because of the moral uncertainty about what the most important things to track are. Even if fellowship completions were a strong metric (which I am very sceptical of), I think at least trying my social-first approach could give lots of valuable insights!Â
I like the call to action - I think there are lots of CBers frustrated about the system they find themselves in who don't feel empowered to do anything about it. When I wrote the post you referenced, I had a bunch of organisers tell me how much it changed their group's trajectory just by echoing ideas they had that they wouldn't act on by default. More legibility of the agency CBers have seems really needed; showing people they don't have to blindly follow a default path seems to happen scarily little, so I appreciate the post - would love to see more like it!Â