EA - EA Barcelona: Our first year of impact by Melanie Brennan

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Barcelona: Our first year of impact, published by Melanie Brennan on January 2, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DR: 2023 was the first year that EA Barcelona has had a designated community builder (me!), and our community has grown substantially as a result. This post summarises what went well, what we found challenging and our plans for 2024.Disclaimer: This is my first EA forum post and I'm nervous. This time a year ago, I didn't really know what an "x-risk" was, and I pronounced "utilitarianism" as "utalatarianism" (but hey, I wasn't the only one!). But things have changed a lot since then, so I wrote this post with different goals in mind: to reflect, to inform, to entertain and (hopefully) to inspire. Also, I come from an Arts background, and I think it's kind of nice to balance AI Safety heavy stuff with lighter fun stuff from time to time.Shoutout: This post was partially inspired by (but can never live up to) the postThe Spanish Speaking Effective Altruism community is awesome! written byJaime Sevilla.Some context on EA in Spain & in BarcelonaThere have been a number of attempts to build an EA community in Spain over the years. In Madrid circa 2019, there was quite an active community infamously known as "Jaime and the Pablos", who held weekly activities and organized several larger events as well. And in Barcelona, there was also a small but passionate group meeting up regularly around the same time. However, due to the pandemic, changes in direction and other factors, neither one continued beyond 2020 as a formally coordinated, sustainable local group.Fast forward to July 2021 and enter another Pablo:Pablo Rosado - principal data scientist atOur World In Data and also my partner. Pablo R. had been learning about EA online and trying to apply its principles to his life for a couple of years already when he discovered the semi-dormant EA Barcelona Facebook page. He noticed that a couple of guys were planning to meet up and "have a chat about EA" that afternoon, so he went off to meet them and didn't come back until about 7 hours later.And that was the origins of what is now the second wave of EA Barcelona - kudos to Sam Bakeysfield, Miguel Gimeno and others for taking the initiative back then! This small group continued meeting up for their long and thought-provoking chats from time to time, until eventually I got curious and started tagging along too. Then in 2022, once Sam had moved to Portugal and Miguel to The Netherlands, Pablo and I decided to take over as group organisers. For the rest of the year, we ran a couple of introductory talks and arranged the odd casual meeting for the tiny number of EAs who remained.Then, in April 2023, after attending the amazingly inspiringEAGxLatAm in Mexico City, quitting my job immediately afterwards and taking a 2-month sabbatical in Australia to visit friends and family, I applied for funding from the EAIF to do community building professionally. I returned to Barcelona to the exciting news that I had been awarded the grant, and the rest is history! Well, 8 months of history for now.EA Barcelona finally starts to take shapeI started on the grant in May, and what a whirlwind of a time it's been since then! We've run lots of different kinds of events, such as expert talks, discussion groups, coworking sessions and social activities, and we've managed to attract a diverse group of interested people to the movement.Here are a few highlights of 2023, as always best expressed in images and (occasionally amusing) captions:Our main achievements in 2023Our overarching goal was to both consolidate and grow the local EA community for the rest of the year (May through December). Given the humble state EA Barcelona was in prior to this, having about 5-7 committed members and very few activities, I woul...