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This is: Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/Summer 2019, published by Ben_West, Centre for Effective Altruism on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) aims to grow and maintain the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. As part of that work, it is important for us to understand the needs, values, and concerns of members of the EA community.
CEA collects feedback from community members in a variety of ways (see “CEA’s Feedback Process” below). In the spring and summer of 2019, we reached out to about a dozen people who work in senior positions in EA-aligned organizations to solicit their feedback. We were particularly interested to get their take on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. Despite this focus, the interviews were open-ended and tended to cover the areas each person felt was important.
This document is a summary of their feedback. The feedback is presented “as is,” without any endorsement by CEA. This feedback represents a small (albeit influential) portion of the EA community, and should be considered in context with other sources of feedback.
This post is the first in a series of upcoming posts where we aim to share summaries of the feedback we have received. The second is here.
CEA’s Feedback Process
CEA has, historically, been much better at collecting feedback than at publishing the results of what we collect. This post is part of our attempt to address that shortcoming and publish more feedback, but, until more can be published, we want to share more details about the types of feedback we collect.
As some examples of other sources of feedback CEA has collected this year:
We have received about 2,000 questions, comments and suggestions via Intercom (a chat widget on many of CEA’s websites) so far this year
We hosted a group leaders retreat (27 attendees), a community builders retreat (33 attendees), and had calls with organizers from 20 EA groups asking about what’s currently going on in their groups and how CEA can be helpful
Calls with 18 of our most prolific EA Forum users, to ask how the Forum can be made better.
A “medium-term events” survey, where we asked everyone who had attended an Individual Outreach retreat how the retreat impacted them 6-12 months later. (53 responses)
EA Global has an advisory board of ~25 people who are asked for opinions about content, conference size, format, etc., and we receive 200-400 responses to the EA Global survey from attendees each time.
The feedback summarized in this document sometimes agrees with other feedback we have received, and sometimes disagrees. This document generally presents feedback “as is” in an attempt to give an accurate summary of people’s responses, even if the feedback here disagreed with opinions we have gotten from other data sources.
Solutions Mentioned in this Document
In addition to examples of concerns respondents raised, this document contains efforts CEA has implemented which may address the concern. Efforts are ongoing, so these ideas are not intended to be final solutions, and we will continue to iterate as we gather more information about how things are working. Additionally, the solutions were not necessarily triggered by this feedback – many of these projects were started before the feedback round was run, were inspired by other feedback, etc.
Executive Summary
Things Which Are Going Well
CEA’s Community Health and Events Projects. Respondents felt that the Community Health team does important work to keep the community safe, and there is a strong argument for a central entity like CEA to oversee community health. EA Global is the “flagship” event of the community, and smaller events run by CEA were also positively regarded.
EA Community Members are Smart, Talented, and Thoughtful. Respondents frequently mentioned ...
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