Resources and Playbooks for University Groups

University groups (especially those focused on AI Safety and effective altruism) form one of (if not the single) best entry points for talent looking to work on extremely high-impact projects.

Groups generally lack shared "playbooks" for commonly run programmes (e.g. retreats). This means:

• Groups often fall foul of common "failure modes"
• Organisers feel daunted about running new programmes from scratch
• There is a lot of duplicated work done even when programming is successful
• Newer organizers often don't develop strong mental models of what good organizing looks like

Many of these resources (especially on the AI safety side) are stale or non-existent. Meta uni groups support has always been capacity constrained, and updating / expanding groups resources has been neglected.

There's a relatively small number of organizers in the space who have incredibly strong mental modeling and experience organizing university groups. They can spread this information somewhat within their university group but oftentimes have trouble finding successors as well as spreading this information to other university groups. The goal of this project would mainly be finding these people and distilling their knowledge into an easily digestible resource center, to spread this knowledge of how to do effective organizing to a wider variety of people and groups.

James will be working on the Groups team at CEA (and Nixon will likely be working with Kairos) during the project. We expect to be able to support no more than 40h/week of mentee time (e.g. a team of 4 mentees working 10h/week each, or some combination of fewer mentees working less time). We will be able to get mentees access to necessary inputs (interviews with people, data, private docs if appropriate).

• University groups form one of (if not the single) best entry points for talent looking to work on extremely high-impact projects. These mainly comprise EA and AI safety groups, broadly interpreted.
• Groups generally lack shared "playbooks" for commonly run programmes (e.g. retreats): groups often fall foul of common "failure modes", and organisers feel daunted about running new programmes from scratch.
• Many of these resources (especially on the AI safety side) are stale or non-existent. Meta uni groups support has always been capacity constrained, and updating / expanding groups resources has always been slightly neglected.

Mentees will prioritise gaps in the resource centres (CEA's and/or Kairos'), look through and distill existing materials (and data) on group success, interview key stakeholders (at Kairos, CEA, and organisers themselves) to identify common blind spots, and write up new and updated articles for these resource centres (which can also be circulated more widely). A large part of mentees' research will be figuring out which articles to write, and how the resource centres can be most useful to new organisers.

The average article should take roughly 5–10 hours of mentee time from beginning to end, with roughly 1–2 hours of mentor time — the output is a steady stream of new and updated groups-resources articles for CEA/Kairos to approve.

We don't have strong takes on what's most useful for mentees to work on, and are willing to adjust the project according to their interests. We expect that mentees will spend most of their writing efforts on more object-level playbooks (e.g. for retreats), while we'll focus on writing up the more strategy-focused articles, although the whole process should be highly collaborative. We think AI safety groups' resources are more neglected and thin, although both EA and AIS are stale, and working on EA groups resources trades off less aggressively with James's job.

There are no formal prerequisites for this project, though we would guess that the successful applicant(s) will have helped lead a group (EA and/or AI safety) and be familiar with many of the tradeoffs and decisions organisers face.

You might be a great fit if:

• You internalise and endorse the impact case for university groups (and meta uni-groups work)
• Your writing is clear, concise and appropriately confident

You might be a worse fit if:

• You're interested in a single, longform report-style output
• You want ultimate editorial control over any outputs that go on the EA or AI safety groups resource centres (CEA and Kairos, respectively, don't want to push advice to groups that they don't endorse)
• Your intuitions for what makes a great group are pretty different to ours across the board. There's obviously nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it might make working together less fun and productive.

If you're worried about any of these caveats (especially the "intuitions about groups") but otherwise think you'll be a great applicant, please apply anyway!