The problem here is that – judging by the policy Catherine Low described – anyone can have anyone else excluded, which is respected regardless of which party was right. (Unless these rules don't apply to everyone equally, which would be even worse.) Had Laura contacted Community Health before the lawyers, saying that her former employer makes her uncomfortable because they owe her a significant paycheck, maybe her former employer would have been excluded from EA events – but this first-mover advantage is nonsense and is not the recipe for a healthy community.

This seems fairly dubious to me, as grounds to exclude someone.

I generally agree (unless the organizer knows for a fact that the excluded person is spreading lies and is good at it, which was absolutely not the case here). As that in 2024 was the first event I organized that was bigger than a birthday party with nine friends present, I constantly felt in over my head, so I could neither judge everything rationally, nor could I always live up to my values of fairness and truth. (And deferring to authority figures as David explained likely also played a role, especially when their name suggests that they are responsible for a healthy community.)

I'd like to point out that we – as independent organizers – weren't pressured by CH to make this decision, but that doesn't change the fact that a very skewed picture was painted to us by CH, which we took at face value.

I was the co-organizer of Summer Camp 2024, an independently funded event happening yearly near Berlin, with the purpose of bringing EA community members together to do silly light-hearted activities. As applications rolled in, we sent them to Community Health so that they compare them against their blacklist, with the stipulation that for any matching name we also get a reason why that person is banned. (Again, we were doing this voluntarily – the event was funded 100% from ticket income, and not at all by CEA, therefore applicant filtering was also fully in our control.) Laura's name was flagged, and in a private call with Community Health we were informed that she filed a lawsuit against members of the EA community claiming payment for work that she did not perform, and that her participation at our event is recommended against, lest she gather supporters for her case. Based on this point of view, even though uncertain about the actual events, with our organizer time being limited, we took the (safer) decision to not accept Laura to the event. In the rejection email we did not provide full details on the reasons, as we were told by Community Health that Laura could receive information from them on her case.

In hindsight, I regret this decision, and I wish I had dedicated more time to the case before sending out our rejection letter to Laura without course for appealing.

Is the list of events in this season published anywhere? The website doesn't state them: https://praguefallseason.com/#events

After a lot of feedback that our former name "Fake Meat - Real Talk" is ambiguous, we decided to “rebrand” to “Food for Thought”.

Indeed, I thought these discussions were focused on veganism. The new name is clearer, especially with the given tagline ("a series of events, where we discuss philosophical and practical questions of EA in small groups over food and drinks").