Hi, thanks for the comment.

I'm the project lead on EA Community Building Grants, which I think is what your referring to here.

The accredited positions include those that are in EA organisations, but many of the accredited positions are not. For example, accredited positions include doing an economics Phd at a top university, working at Facebook AI research, and many positions listed on the 80,000 Hours jobs board.

Based on the data submitted by groups so far, I'd expect the majority of positions we accredit to not be positions at EA organisations, though we're still in the early stages of receiving and analysing data here.

Our previous update post provides some more context on our evaluation criteria.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RZrikMAuTwt4e9Fs4/ea-community-building-grants-update

Thanks for the post, I just wanted to provide some more context on CEA’s current evaluation of the outputs of local groups. Our main evaluation efforts are directed at the EA Community Building Grants program, and the primary metrics used to assess the grants given are career related outcomes (including group members doing relevant internship, applying for or taking on new roles etc.)

Our assessment of the grants is not limited to career related outcomes though. In retrospectively evaluating a grant we also look at a variety of other outputs including GWWC pledges, projects the group runs and indicators of building a sustainable community amongst other things.

Thanks for the question - the impact evaluation will take place in the summer of 2019, likely around August, which is when the majority of the 1-year community building grants end.

Hi John, thanks for your comment (and sorry for the delay getting back to you)! These metrics were selected by CEA, but we gave current recipients the opportunity to provide feedback on the proposed evaluation procedure.

We think that one of the main route to value of EA Groups is to cause people to change their career trajectory such that they end up contributing to solving some of the world’s most important problems. It does seem that people who are willing to make such changes are more likely to be younger, however there are a number of senior management positions (e.g. Chief of Staff, Chief Operating Officer etc) available within organisations that we would accredit that one could imagine would be more suitable for people more advanced in their careers.

As mentioned in the post, we don’t think career changes are the only route to value for EA Groups, and that there are likely ways in which people who are unlikely to change careers can contribute. Though given that we think career change is a major route to value, we’ve chosen to assess this specifically. We also hope to find out the extent of the value of contributions from individuals who don’t change their career by using a case-by-case, after-the-fact assessment.