TLDR on Ray’s advice to Ray-shaped-people for funding community projects similar to REACH:
REACH seems to be actually doing the thing that a lot of Berkeley community folk have been vaguely wanting for years. It’s providing infrastructure and coordination capacity that has already proven valuable, and I expect to continue to be more valuable.
The Wednesday night meetups are real good. (See first 1/4th of the OP for why that is)
Coworking benefits I’ve gotten have varied (some days it’s just 0-2 people, sometimes it’s a whole crowd, and the crowd varies), but I expect this to become very valuable from a “water-cooler cross-pollination” perspective.
If you haven’t been to REACH yet, or just visited once on what turned out to be a kinda off-day, mostly I recommend checking it out.
Two reasons to fund things that apply here: Effective Altruism, and Buying Nice Things Because You Want Them.
From the Nice Things perspective
a reasonable lower bound on how valuable REACH is to you is “how much would it cost to be doing this thing from a professional market?”. Going to a meetup should at least be comparable to A Night On the Town, between $10 and $20. Coworking should be comparable to at least however many coffees you’d have to buy to feel reasonable if hanging out in Starbucks a commensurate time.
I think the upper bound is much higher – there’s all kinds of subtle chemistry going on at meetups and community centers that aren’t going on at generic coffeeshops and nights-on-the-town. This caches out in new friends, cross-pollination of ideas, new opportunities. If you either expect to benefit from that (and can afford it), or previously benefited from such a thing, I think it’s worth paying-it-forward.
(That said, if you’ve tried going to meetup or participating in various community stuff and feel like you’re not getting that magical chemistry out of it, I don’t think you should be donating out of a vague obligation-shaped impulse. My whole point here is about buying nice things for yourself).
If you don’t have much money, I wouldn’t worry about donating much (although probably donate at least a little to build the habit of actually putting your money where you mouth is, so when you do have money you’ll do so more easily)
I think it’d be bad to consciously think about “spending extra money” every time you go to reach. But I think it’s good to “think seriously about how valuable this is to you, and how much it costs to run, and then set up a monthly patreon accordingly.”
From the EA perspective
Blackbox Basic Research paradigm – One way or another, meetups have provided demonstrably large amounts of value in the form of incubating impactful people and projects. If you care about incubation about the sorts of people and projects that the rationality and EA spheres cause, funding community infrastructure should at least be on your radar. The mechanics of this seem to be:
Agency Ladder – Meetups and community projects provide a mechanism for people with small amounts of agency to start leveling themselves up at Agency, and getting them to a position where they’re ready to provide serious value to professional organizations. If done well, communities are structured in a scalable way that helps people at various stages of the ladder help level up the people coming in behind them, receive help from the people further along.
Water Cooler Effect – Having people bump into each other in an unstructured by regular fashion is pretty important for forming friendships and partnerships, as well as for bouncing ideas around. I think this has led to many projects that are valuable both for their direct outputs, for continuing the agency ladder into the “make big things happen on the global scale” level, and other knock-on effects.
I expect REACH-like projects to not be at the top of the list of EA things to fund, but they should be on the list, and whether it makes sense for you to fund them depends on whether you seem more short on money or on shovel-ready-projects that could use seed funding.
If you are a Earn To Give type person, I think it’s worth considering that most causes that are demonstratably high impact are going to be getting a lot of funding from Big Time Donors, and part of the value you can provide is to use superior local knowledge to give seed funding to things that would otherwise be neglected
If you’re a major funder who’s willing to fund community-infrastructure-type projects but hesitant about proactively funding something like REACH, I think a pretty reasonable take is to do something akin to matching funding. In the world where there weren’t anywhere near enough people paying for REACH out of their Nice Things budget, that would be mild evidence that there wasn’t enough demand for REACH for it to be worth the expense. But in the World That Is, we do now have a fair number of locals putting their money where their mouth is, and (I claim) a credible demonstration that the kind of community magic that’s worth funding.
TLDR on Ray’s advice to Ray-shaped-people for funding community projects similar to REACH:
REACH seems to be actually doing the thing that a lot of Berkeley community folk have been vaguely wanting for years. It’s providing infrastructure and coordination capacity that has already proven valuable, and I expect to continue to be more valuable.
The Wednesday night meetups are real good. (See first 1/4th of the OP for why that is)
Coworking benefits I’ve gotten have varied (some days it’s just 0-2 people, sometimes it’s a whole crowd, and the crowd varies), but I expect this to become very valuable from a “water-cooler cross-pollination” perspective.
If you haven’t been to REACH yet, or just visited once on what turned out to be a kinda off-day, mostly I recommend checking it out.
Two reasons to fund things that apply here: Effective Altruism, and Buying Nice Things Because You Want Them.
From the Nice Things perspective
a reasonable lower bound on how valuable REACH is to you is “how much would it cost to be doing this thing from a professional market?”. Going to a meetup should at least be comparable to A Night On the Town, between $10 and $20. Coworking should be comparable to at least however many coffees you’d have to buy to feel reasonable if hanging out in Starbucks a commensurate time.
I think the upper bound is much higher – there’s all kinds of subtle chemistry going on at meetups and community centers that aren’t going on at generic coffeeshops and nights-on-the-town. This caches out in new friends, cross-pollination of ideas, new opportunities. If you either expect to benefit from that (and can afford it), or previously benefited from such a thing, I think it’s worth paying-it-forward.
(That said, if you’ve tried going to meetup or participating in various community stuff and feel like you’re not getting that magical chemistry out of it, I don’t think you should be donating out of a vague obligation-shaped impulse. My whole point here is about buying nice things for yourself).
If you don’t have much money, I wouldn’t worry about donating much (although probably donate at least a little to build the habit of actually putting your money where you mouth is, so when you do have money you’ll do so more easily)
I think it’d be bad to consciously think about “spending extra money” every time you go to reach. But I think it’s good to “think seriously about how valuable this is to you, and how much it costs to run, and then set up a monthly patreon accordingly.”
From the EA perspective
Blackbox Basic Research paradigm – One way or another, meetups have provided demonstrably large amounts of value in the form of incubating impactful people and projects. If you care about incubation about the sorts of people and projects that the rationality and EA spheres cause, funding community infrastructure should at least be on your radar. The mechanics of this seem to be:
Agency Ladder – Meetups and community projects provide a mechanism for people with small amounts of agency to start leveling themselves up at Agency, and getting them to a position where they’re ready to provide serious value to professional organizations. If done well, communities are structured in a scalable way that helps people at various stages of the ladder help level up the people coming in behind them, receive help from the people further along.
Water Cooler Effect – Having people bump into each other in an unstructured by regular fashion is pretty important for forming friendships and partnerships, as well as for bouncing ideas around. I think this has led to many projects that are valuable both for their direct outputs, for continuing the agency ladder into the “make big things happen on the global scale” level, and other knock-on effects.
I expect REACH-like projects to not be at the top of the list of EA things to fund, but they should be on the list, and whether it makes sense for you to fund them depends on whether you seem more short on money or on shovel-ready-projects that could use seed funding.
If you are a Earn To Give type person, I think it’s worth considering that most causes that are demonstratably high impact are going to be getting a lot of funding from Big Time Donors, and part of the value you can provide is to use superior local knowledge to give seed funding to things that would otherwise be neglected
If you’re a major funder who’s willing to fund community-infrastructure-type projects but hesitant about proactively funding something like REACH, I think a pretty reasonable take is to do something akin to matching funding. In the world where there weren’t anywhere near enough people paying for REACH out of their Nice Things budget, that would be mild evidence that there wasn’t enough demand for REACH for it to be worth the expense. But in the World That Is, we do now have a fair number of locals putting their money where their mouth is, and (I claim) a credible demonstration that the kind of community magic that’s worth funding.