EA - Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2024 by OllieBase

The Nonlinear Library

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: Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2024, published by OllieBase on September 11, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This week, the CEA events team will be running the 2024 edition of the Meta Coordination Forum (MCF) in California. We're bringing together ~40 people leading EA community-building organizations and projects to foster a shared understanding of some of the biggest challenges facing our community and align on strategies for addressing these problems. This is a short post to provide the wider community with a sense of the event's goals and who will be attending.
Goals and themes
The Meta Coordination Forum aims to:
Build a shared understanding among attendees of some of the biggest challenges facing the EA community.
Provide space for attendees to discuss, get feedback on, and develop strategies for addressing these challenges.
Foster more collaboration among people leading EA meta-organizations and projects.
While we're encouraging attendees to prioritize one-on-one meetings and private conversations, our structured sessions will focus on two key themes:
Brand: what's the current state of the EA brand, what outcomes do we want, and how can we achieve them?
Funding: what's the current state of the funding landscape in EA, what strategies should we use to diversify funding, and what steps should we take?
At the event, we'll also be conducting a survey similar to the one we ran in
2019 and
2023, and which 80,000 Hours ran in
2017 and
2018. We're partnering with Rethink Priorities on this survey. We hope this survey will provide CEA, attendees at the event, and the wider community with a better sense of the talent gaps that organizations face, as well as insights into some key questions facing the community.
Attendees
We invited attendees based on their ability to contribute to and implement strategies addressing our core themes. While we aimed for a balanced representation across the meta work that is going on, our primary focus was on individuals best positioned to drive progress on behalf of the community. We acknowledge that others might take a different approach to inviting attendees or have thoughts on who was omitted and welcome suggestions for future events.
Below is the list of attendees who've agreed to share that they're attending the event. This list makes up the majority of attendees at the event - some preferred not to have their attendance made public.
Alexander Berger
Howie Lempel
Marcus Davis
Amy Labenz
Jacob Eliosoff
Max Daniel
Anne Schulze
Jessica McCurdy
Melanie Basnak
Arden Koehler
JP Addison
Michelle Hutchinson
Bella Forristal
JueYan Zhang
Mike Levine
Claire Zabel
Julia Wise
Nicole Ross
Devon Fritz
Karolina Sarek
Patrick Gruban
Eli Rose
Kelsey Piper
Simran Dhaliwal
Emma Richter
Lewis Bollard
Sjir Hoeijmakers
George Rosenfeld
Luke Freeman
Will MacAskill
Zachary Robinson
This is not a canonical list of "key people working in meta EA" or "EA leaders." There are plenty of people who are not attending this event who are doing high-value work in the meta-EA space. Note that we have a few attendees at this year's event who are specialists in one of our focus areas rather than leaders of an EA meta organization or team (though some attendees are both).
We'll also encourage attendees to share their memos on the forum and think about other updates we can share that will aid transparency and coordination.
A note on comments: we'll be running the event this week, so won't have capacity to engage in the comments. However, we will be reading them, and that can inform discussions at the event.
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