Community Builder at Effective Altruism Switzerland (EACH), based in Zürich. I previously graduated in physics and am very much into AI safety. Really like HPMOR.
MariusWenk
Karma: 37
Learnings from the Zurich AI Safety Day
How cause-area specific conferences can strengthen the EA community
Thanks a lot for your thoughts! I think I agree that using the name of a national organization might reduce the traction for an international network. I think the point I was trying to make was that starting an international network from nothing could be very hard. In that sense, it would be easier to grow the network as an already established national organization, even under a misleading name.
I definitely agree with you that branching out the international network from a national organization might be the best solution to both problems. You could give the new organization a new name but use the connections and resources that the national organization has built.
I think one example of successful scaling into an international organization could be to continuously increase the radius of connected AI Safety organizations. If not connected to them already, approach neighbouring organizations and, for example, coordinate monthly check-in calls with them. Once that exists, publish it, streamline the onboarding process, and reach out directly to any known AI Safety field-building organization. Then use those calls to coordinate on an international strategy and ideally grow from there.
So in the beginning, it might be a national organization that uses its reputation to reach out to people, but with the emergence of an independent website and collaborators from several groups, this might branch out relatively quickly as its own collaborative thing. It could start with every individual organization only using a small part of their resources for this project and evolve into a dedicated person becoming the main community coordinator. A dedicated name for this network would, of course, be helpful to publicize it.
I agree regarding big EA tent events being healthy and still very high-impact.
I was actually co-organizing a one-day conference on AI Safety in Zurich in September (Zurich AI Safety Day). This was a collaboration of BlueDot Impact and Zurich AI Safety, with more than 200 participants. I just published a post on the learnings from this conference here. Although this isn’t recurring yet, I feel like there was substantial value in it, which also, in part, motivated me to write this post.
For future iterations of something like this, it might indeed be useful to use that domain.
Also exciting to hear that Skyler might be interested in AIS group support. Depending on which kind of group support you are talking about, there is also Kairos, which supports local groups through their Pathfinder Fellowship.