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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: Ideas from network science about EA community building, published by vaidehi agarwalla on February 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I've chosen to publish this post even though I do feel that some of the arguments could be refined further because I'm trying to not make perfect the enemy of good. Many thanks to David Nash, Gidon Kadosh, Xuan and Arjun Khandelwal for comments and suggestions on this post. TL:DR; Community builders are well positioned to make more high-quality connections for relatively low costs to make local groups and the EA community as a whole have more strong and weak ties, be more distributed (and thus resilient) and stay open to new connections. Key Takeaways We want EA to be a network of strong and weak ties. Strong ties can help improve coordination and collaboration within the community. Weak ties can help with bilateral information flow, reduce insularity and create a more welcoming community. (Read More) We want EA as a whole to be closer to a distributed network where people have strong connections with several other people, rather than a extremely centralised network with strong connections to only a few people. Having multiple connections can make groups more resilient. Over-centralisation of connections and information can be suboptimal. (Read More) We want EA to be an open network - individuals have capacity and are open to new connections. We are doing a fairly good job of this right now within the community, but could probably make a more concerted effort to engage with actors from other communities. (Read More) These network diagrams are missing important decision-relevant aspects of connection-making including the kinds of connections and the timing of those connections . (Read More) It may be high impact and low-cost to invest more time making high-quality connections within local groups and communities. We can make connections between members of a specific EA group to create friendship, peer bonding and solidarity, within different EA groups to help members connect with people or subcommunities they have more in common with, and to non-EAs to help them explore opportunities that EA may not be able to provide currently. (Read More) Some practical tips for making connections include modelling good 1-1s to help establish these as a normal and exciting part of the group culture, creating directories, making introductions to subcommunity community builders, encouraging members to attend EA conferences or attending them yourself and networking with others in mind. (Read More) Some common problems that may come up, and some rough attempts to troubleshoot them. (Read More) Some important linguistic notes: I refer to networks in the sense of “structures of connected people”, and specifically what the structure of an EA group could look like. I’m not thinking about it in the sense of “professional networks” a la Community vs Network. The terms I use (strong / distributed / open) are technical terms taken directly from network science (I am typically a fan of not adding new jargon to the EA lexicon). I don’t mean to invoke common connotations associated with these terms and encourage the reader to replace these words with other, more neutral words if they find themselves doing so. We want to create. A network of strong ties and weak ties A strong tie between two people is a relationship that is quite strong - friends, family, close colleagues. It could be someone from whom you would feel comfortable asking a favour (for advice or an introduction, for example - this is the metric used by the CEA events team for EA Globals). We want to build strong ties between the local and global EA community because they can lead to better and cooperation, trust and coordination. It's worth asking - what does it take to get someone to feel comfort...