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: Reflections on Berkeley REACH , published by stardust on the AI Alignment Forum. This post covers my findings so far in the experiment of running the Berkeley Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub (REACH). Crossposted on EA Forum and LessWrong. tl;dr REACH has been running since March 2018 (around three months) It’s doing well Hundreds of people have enjoyed REACH During the day, there are generally between 3 and 10 people coworking Regular events draw 10-40 people Large one-time events draw around 100 It has broad support -- over 100 people have donated significant time (from one afternoon of work up to around 40 hours) and/or money Patreon, one-time donations, and guest rooms have covered the rent until it was recently raised Community guests can stay there for relatively low prices for the area It has been full 75% of the time in May I’d like you to be involved Visit and attend events at REACH Volunteer (see this doc for some ways to help) Host events Monday, Thursday, and Friday nights are currently available for recurring or one-time events (see calendar) Help bridge our funding gap Rent has gone up to $6k/month unless we find a new venue We need to be able to pay a manager Managing the space takes 10-30 hours per week Help us find and apply for grants already planning to re-apply for CEA and BERI grants Put your own money in the pot if you find the project valuable (see Patreon or Paypal) Provide specific items to improve the space Why We Needed a Community Space What A Physical Space Can Do for Community Around December 2017, I started thinking that it would be really nice to have a central place where community members could: Conveniently host events (a function that had been fulfilled by the CFAR office before the switch to badged access) Cowork with community members during the day Come for low-key spontaneous socializing Bring kids to play together Be a default place to meet up with someone to chat about EA/R things Crash on a couch or grab a bed and stay for a while My initial thought was “we should buy a decommissioned church building!” However, I realized that funding such a large purchase would be pretty tricky, and that I could and probably should try out my ideas in a rental first and work toward buying a venue later. Even Berkeley Can Be Lonely People often talk about Berkeley as if it’s a magical community hub, but actually many community members feel lonely, depressed and/or anxious (including myself). This has been a theme that has been coming up in public spaces as far back as winter solstice 2014. I have seen several attempts to mitigate this issue, but none have seemed to stick. Newcomers to the Berkeley community often find it difficult to become a part of the physical-space community—likely because much of the socializing happening in private spaces such as group houses, meaning that people only invite the folks they already know and trust. There are LessWrong meetups in Berkeley and SF, and EA meetups in the South Bay, but travelling for at least an hour to get to a regular EA meetup felt too difficult to work into my schedule, and the Berkeley LW meetup hasn’t felt like the right space for me. The Hopes of Project Hufflepuff In 2017, Ray Arnold ran the Hufflepuff Unconference. At that event, I volunteered to join the bay area rationalist Welcoming Committee. That group accomplished a few things in the attempt to make the bay area community more inviting: Ensured that larger, more open events happened every few months (previously there was only 1 community-wide open event per year) Took over upkeep of the bayrationality.com website Created a document with trigger action plans for being more welcoming Started a discussion around documenting group norms There were several other ideas which were discussed at the Project Hufflepuff m...