EA - Yale EA got an office. How did it go? by M. Thaddeus Burtell

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Yale EA got an office. How did it go?, published by M. Thaddeus Burtell on August 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Tl;dr It went okay. The office increased EA-related interactions and allowed for fellowship discussions to go on longer than they otherwise would have, but managing the office was costlier (in time and money) than the positive outcomes. Yale EA leadership decided not to continue with the office for the next year. Thanks to Thomas Woodside, Alexa Pan, Jessica McCurdy, and Eui Young Kim for providing feedback. Intro Intended audience: People who think about community building. The motivation of this post is to describe the outcomes from the Yale EA office and to give some context to people who either manage EA offices or are thinking about creating an office. This post will contain some commentary on why we created an office, how we used the office, and some things I’ve learned that I want to share. Theory of change When EAs talk and hang out with other EAs, good things happen. Conversations are very good at getting people to think harder about EA things. I think that “thinking hard about EA things” cashes out into students working on the most pressing problems. But going from “interested in EA” to “dedicating their career to work on whatever is most impactful” is better understood as a complex system rather than a step-by-step linear process. Having conversations is only one component in a much larger thing, but it’s an important component nevertheless. The primary way that EA student groups get conversations to happen is through one-on-one conversations and fellowship discussion groups. Each of these comes with costs to community builders’ time. One-on-ones require some central planning. The responsibility is on community builders to identify who should talk to who. The office would make this less bottlenecky by creating a space where people figured out who they wanted to talk to on their own. This is both more organic and more conducive to people becoming friends. Fellowship discussions are another place that people go to talk. Sometimes, when things were really great, people would want to stay after the fellowship to talk more. Because we had full control of the office, those conversations could continue without being interrupted by the next student group that had the room reserved. Having a dedicated space for people to work together can make people feel more involved, expose them to more spontaneous information about opportunities, cause them to have more conversations with others who are very committed, and otherwise increase the ambient amount of EA-relevant interactions that occur in the student group. Some universities have math lounges. It’s like most other places on campus except with more chalkboards and near math department offices. Math lounges are the default location where math collaboration happens. Essentially we were trying to create a math lounge, but for EA. Given the potential benefits, the Yale EA leadership decided that it would be worth experimenting with an office space. We created a doc that expressed this to members of YEA. It is viewable here. Office search considerations There were a few considerations in deciding where to have the office: Minimizing transactional overheads. I thought of the office as a minimum viable product to test the hypothesis that a common space would increase the metrics we hoped to increase. We wanted a system that was easy to deal with. I didn’t want to have some transactional overhead where I had to deal with a landlord and be especially careful with which paperwork I signed. I wanted to work with an agency that makes it easy to lease and to end the lease. In case the experiment failed, we didn’t want to be beholden to a lease that extended past when the space would be useful. (e.g. a semes...