Travel grant funding will likely be more restrictive. Previously we’ve funded people to travel to any EA conference they’ve been accepted to. We expect to retain some amount of travel funding moving forwards, but we’ll likely have to be much more conservative about how much we give and who we give it to. When planning around an event, we’d recommend you act under the assumption that we will not be able to grant your travel funding request (unless it has already been approved).
I think it would be good to clarify how this affects people with less financial stability and/or who are based in countries that are farther away (specifically for EAG’s). To me, providing funding for these groups seems like the biggest positives, since they would be least likely to attend without support. [edit: and generally have less opportunities for meeting the international EA community]
Agree, besides being further away, this would most probably reduce the number of EAs from LMICs who go to EA conferences. I’m from Turkey and the limited number of people from Turkey who have gone to an EAGx did so because there was travel funding(including my first two conferences) and I’m quite confident none of them would be able to go if there was no funding(because I personally know them). I was thinking that 6 people from our college group would come to the next EAGx in Europe, but if there is no travel funding no one besides me most probably won’t go(and I would be able to go because I’m on an EA fellowship!)
Still, I’m not saying all EAs from LMICs should be reimbursed or it makes sense to fund people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to come to conferences(if they didn’t receive funding) but i) on the margin providing travels grants to people from countries with low EA presence may have higher bang for the buck ii)A very selective travel grants policy would have this consequence(effectively reducing a considerable number of EAs based in LMICs from participating in EAGs)
It’s hard to respond with too much detail here because it’s a changing landscape and I’m not sure what things will look like in six months or even a year. But broadly speaking I expect the policies to be different for EAGs and EAGx’s, and also to vary between EAGx conferences (some EAGx events wouldn’t really work without travel support, whereas others would work roughly fine).
For EAGs in particular, we’ll assess each case individually (taking into account to what extent they’d be unable to attend without support) but expect to not be able to give out much travel grants overall — if I had to ballpark make a guess here I’d say ~10% of what we gave this year (but again the landscape might change, so don’t take this too literally).
(Someone else commented about applicants from LMICs — this is minor but I’ll note that we don’t get too many applications from LMICs and the bulk of travel grant applications are from people living in the “standard” countries you’d expect, like the US, UK, and Europe.)
I think it would be good to clarify how this affects people with less financial stability and/or who are based in countries that are farther away (specifically for EAG’s). To me, providing funding for these groups seems like the biggest positives, since they would be least likely to attend without support. [edit: and generally have less opportunities for meeting the international EA community]
Agree, besides being further away, this would most probably reduce the number of EAs from LMICs who go to EA conferences. I’m from Turkey and the limited number of people from Turkey who have gone to an EAGx did so because there was travel funding(including my first two conferences) and I’m quite confident none of them would be able to go if there was no funding(because I personally know them). I was thinking that 6 people from our college group would come to the next EAGx in Europe, but if there is no travel funding no one besides me most probably won’t go(and I would be able to go because I’m on an EA fellowship!)
Still, I’m not saying all EAs from LMICs should be reimbursed or it makes sense to fund people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to come to conferences(if they didn’t receive funding) but i) on the margin providing travels grants to people from countries with low EA presence may have higher bang for the buck ii)A very selective travel grants policy would have this consequence(effectively reducing a considerable number of EAs based in LMICs from participating in EAGs)
It’s hard to respond with too much detail here because it’s a changing landscape and I’m not sure what things will look like in six months or even a year. But broadly speaking I expect the policies to be different for EAGs and EAGx’s, and also to vary between EAGx conferences (some EAGx events wouldn’t really work without travel support, whereas others would work roughly fine).
For EAGs in particular, we’ll assess each case individually (taking into account to what extent they’d be unable to attend without support) but expect to not be able to give out much travel grants overall — if I had to ballpark make a guess here I’d say ~10% of what we gave this year (but again the landscape might change, so don’t take this too literally).
(Someone else commented about applicants from LMICs — this is minor but I’ll note that we don’t get too many applications from LMICs and the bulk of travel grant applications are from people living in the “standard” countries you’d expect, like the US, UK, and Europe.)