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: CEA Mid-year update (2020), published by MaxDalton on the AI Alignment Forum. Write a Review This is a linkpost for/ We'd like to share an update on our recent progress. In a previous post, we set out five goals for 2020: Developing our strategy: We're on track, with more work needed on metrics and data. Narrowing our scope by considering spinning off EA Funds and Giving What We Can: We're slightly ahead of expectations; we hired leaders and set an initial strategic direction for each project. Expanding group and community health support: We're somewhat behind expectations. Improving online discussion: We're somewhat ahead of expectations. We learned a lot about how to run virtual events, and EA Forum engagement has grown significantly. Streamlining internal collaboration and processes: We're on track or ahead of expectations on finances, customer relationship management (CRM), and culture. We're behind on hiring and the Oxford office move. Overall, I think we're making good progress toward our goals for the year. Specific progress: We hired Jonas Vollmer to lead EA Funds, and Luke Freeman to lead Giving What We Can. Jonas and Luke are experienced EAs with executive experience and excellent skillsets for the roles. We plan to investigate spinning off both organisations from CEA in the next year or so, although we will continue to support them both operationally. We hired Catherine Low as a contractor to improve support for groups, and she's had 60+ calls with organisers who gave the calls an NPS of 70+, which is excellent. We've also updated 16 resources for local groups, including an improved introductory fellowship curriculum template, discussion group guides, and advice on how to host virtual events in light of COVID-19 restrictions. Further progress here is a major focus. We renewed several Community Building Grants and made three new grants to EA Brown, EA NYC, and EA MIT. Events collaborated with EAGx organisers from around the world to create EAGx Virtual. With over 1,400 attendees, it was the largest EA event ever held. Virtual events are unlikely to be as valuable as in-person events, but now that we've developed the capacity to hold virtual events, we will likely continue to do so (in addition to holding live events), since they are less expensive and more accessible. Our key Forum metric (views of good posts) has doubled so far this year, meaning that more good content is being posted to the Forum and more people are reading that content. We also introduced highly-demanded features like tags, and some core introductory content. We've focused our community health work on mentorship and networking for underrepresented EA groups, and developing long-term plans to further improve diversity, equity, and belonging in the community. I also feel that we've fixed a lot of internal issues over the last 18 months and that we continue to gradually improve. We have 13 months of runway. Staff performance, morale, and retention appear to be solid and improving. We've improved our accounting systems, grantmaking records, and HR compliance/onboarding, and invested our reserves to protect against inflation. Program updates Groups We’re in the early stages of improving our support for groups. This is a major focus at the moment. Groups support We are working to improve the introductory EA fellowship template with Community Building Grant recipients Huw Thomas, James Aung, and Alex Holness-Tofts. Introductory EA fellowships are eight-week reading and discussion groups run on university campuses. We estimate that approximately 400 students participated in an intro fellowship last year. We brought on Catherine Low, who had been an extraordinarily active volunteer supporter of EA groups, as a contractor to improve our support of groups. Catherine has had 60+ calls with group org...