In this post we share our experience of running an online reading group in hope to help others who run similar projects. This is a part of our Community Building work in EA Poland. 

You can read more about our other activities in our recently published post.

TLDR

We’ve been running an online reading group for 9 months in Poland, once every 2 weeks. We invite people through our social media - Facebook, Instagram, and newsletter. Some meetings attracted a lot of (even 15) people, some did not. We had two objectives in mind:

• Community building - using reading group as low-commitment entry-point to EA. It probably failed. Although a few new people joined our Slack after the meetings, they are no longer active.
• Creating and strengthening bonds between EAs. Limited success. Success, because of 1) just hanging out together, 2) exploring tough topics together, made us friends. Limited, because there are only a few regular participants, so our bonding is limited to this small subgroup of the EA community.

Our current plan is to continue organizing those meetings.

Our previous experience

In this post I describe details of how our reading group has worked since November 2022, when we decided to keep our meetings open to everyone. Before that, from March to September 2022, we had our internal book club meetings (only for EAs, not announced on our social media). We read Doing Good Better and The Precipice. From those meetings we had a few main insights:

• Weekly meetings are too time consuming for us.
• Reading whole books does not work for us because
  • People who missed a few meetings are less likely to join in the middle of the book.
  • Over time, we get tired of discussing the same topic.
• Moral claims are much more likely to start a discussion than factual ones. We learnt that while reading The Precipice - chapters 1 and 2 of The Precipice led to fiery discussions on longtermism, but later chapters, which contained mostly factual information about particular X-risks and we found that there was really nothing to talk about.

How it works

Organisation

• We meet every 2 weeks, online. 
• The meeting lasts 1h15min. We started with 1h and then agreed that we’d prefer longer meetings.
• Each meeting is announced on Facebook, Instagram and in our newsletter.
• I prepared a Doc with the key actions when organizing the meetings. Might be helpful for other organizers.

Readings selection

• We decide on the next reading together. I collect 4-5 diverse titles and write a very short description of each of them. Then, I post them on our community Slack channel and we start voting.
• We choose readings that are easily accessible - either free online access or available in most public libraries.
• Topics are related to EA, ethics, philosophy. We just read what seems interesting to us at a given moment.
• We try to select readings that take 1-1.5 hours to read. We noticed that with longer readings we sometimes fail to complete them.
• In the final paragraph of this post I gathered all our readings and general impressions from the meetings.

How it worked out

We had three main goals:

1. Having fun ourselves and learning new stuff together.
2. Community building - using reading group as low-commitment entry-point to EA.
3. Strengthening bonds between Effective Altruists.

We think that we indeed 1. had fun and 3. got to know each other better. We also think that those meetings can be used as an entry-point for non-EA people, however we do not find support for this in our statistics. Indeed a few people joined our community Slack because of the reading group however they are no longer active users. In January 2023 we started organizing Intro Fellowship, so it is possible that it attracted newcomers who would have otherwise joined our reading group.

Lessons learnt

• Long books can be too long because participants drop out, and no new people join in the middle of the book and participants might get bored.
• Readings on morality are more discussion-friendly than readings on pure facts.
• It might be tempting to plan a lot of reading for a single meeting, but in the long run we were just failing to complete it.
• Meeting once a week was too frequent for us to sustain in the long run.

What’s next?

We plan to continue organizing meetings only changing the frequency. Instead of one meeting every two weeks, we would like to try doing them once a month. We expect that this could increase the attendance because it’d be easier for busy participants to find some time to prepare and attend.

Statistics

Here are some statistics and comments from our previous meetings. This can perhaps be useful for other book club organizers, just to see how a particular reading worked out for us.