How valuable is building a high-quality (for-profit) event app for future EA conferences?
There are 6 eag(x) conferences a year. this number will probably increase over time and more conferences will come up as EA grows- I’d expect somewhere between 80-200 EA-related conferences and related events in the next 10 years. This includes cause-area specific conferences, like Catalyst and other large events.
A typical 2.5 day conference with on average ~300 attendees spending 30 hours = 9,000 man-hours would be a range of 720,000-1,800,000 man hours over 10 years. Of this time, I’d expect 90% to be taken up doing meetings, attending events, eating etc. Of the remaining 10%, so 7,200-18,000 saving 1% of this time is in the range of 7,200- 18,000 hours or roughly seems pretty useful!
For reference, 1 year of work (a 40 hours work-week for 50 weeks) = 2000 hours.
Pricing estimate if we pay for an event conferencing app: Swapcard, recently used by CEA for EAGx events costs approximately USD$7 per user.
Using my previous estimate, the total cost over 10 years would be between USD $168,000-420,000 without any discounting. Discounting 50% for technology becoming cheaper, and charity discounts, we could conservatively say $84,000-$210,000 total cost.
Not sure what to do with this information, or how to compute the value of this money saved (assuming our benevolent EA ally /​ app creator gives us access for a heavily discounted price, otherwise the savings are not that important).
Given the pandemic, I would actually upgrade the potential cost effectiveness of this, because we can now add Student Summits and EAGxVirtuals as potentially regular events, bringing the total in a non-COVID year to up to 8 events.
Hm I think Swapcard is good enough for now, and I like it more than the Grip app. I think this comes down to what specific features people want in the conference app and why this would make things easier or better.
Of course it would be good to centralize platforms in the future (i.e. maybe the EA Hub also becomes a Conference platform), but I don’t see that being a particularly good use of time.
+1 the math there. How does building an app compare to throwing more resources at finding better pre-existing apps?
I’ll just add I find it kind of annoying how the event app keeps getting switched up. I thought Grip was better than whatever was used recently for EAGxAsia_Pacific (Catalyst?).
I think CEA has looked at a number of apps—it wold definitely be worth checking with them to see how many apps they’ve considered out of the total number of apps available, and possibly follow the 37% rule.
It seems plausible, though overall not that likely, to me that maybe the LessWrong team should just build our own conference platform into the forum. We might look into that next year as we are also looking to maybe organize some conferences.
That would be interesting! I’d be interested to see if that happens—I think there are probably a benefits from integration with the LW/​EA Forum. In what scenario do you think this would be the most likely?
I think it’s most likely if the LessWrong team decides to run a conference, and then after looking into alternatives for a bit, decides that it’s best to just build our own thing.
I think it’s much more likely if LW runs a conference than if CEA runs another conference, not because I would want to prioritize a LW conference app over an EAG app, but because I expect the first version of it to be pretty janky, and I wouldn’t want to inflict that on the poor CEA team without being the people who built it directly and know in which ways it might break.
How valuable is building a high-quality (for-profit) event app for future EA conferences?
There are 6 eag(x) conferences a year. this number will probably increase over time and more conferences will come up as EA grows- I’d expect somewhere between 80-200 EA-related conferences and related events in the next 10 years. This includes cause-area specific conferences, like Catalyst and other large events.
A typical 2.5 day conference with on average ~300 attendees spending 30 hours = 9,000 man-hours would be a range of 720,000-1,800,000 man hours over 10 years. Of this time, I’d expect 90% to be taken up doing meetings, attending events, eating etc. Of the remaining 10%, so 7,200-18,000 saving 1% of this time is in the range of 7,200- 18,000 hours or roughly seems pretty useful!
For reference, 1 year of work (a 40 hours work-week for 50 weeks) = 2000 hours.
Pricing estimate if we pay for an event conferencing app: Swapcard, recently used by CEA for EAGx events costs approximately USD$7 per user.
Using my previous estimate, the total cost over 10 years would be between USD $168,000-420,000 without any discounting. Discounting 50% for technology becoming cheaper, and charity discounts, we could conservatively say $84,000-$210,000 total cost.
Not sure what to do with this information, or how to compute the value of this money saved (assuming our benevolent EA ally /​ app creator gives us access for a heavily discounted price, otherwise the savings are not that important).
Given the pandemic, I would actually upgrade the potential cost effectiveness of this, because we can now add Student Summits and EAGxVirtuals as potentially regular events, bringing the total in a non-COVID year to up to 8 events.
Hm I think Swapcard is good enough for now, and I like it more than the Grip app. I think this comes down to what specific features people want in the conference app and why this would make things easier or better.
Of course it would be good to centralize platforms in the future (i.e. maybe the EA Hub also becomes a Conference platform), but I don’t see that being a particularly good use of time.
+1 the math there. How does building an app compare to throwing more resources at finding better pre-existing apps?
I’ll just add I find it kind of annoying how the event app keeps getting switched up. I thought Grip was better than whatever was used recently for EAGxAsia_Pacific (Catalyst?).
I think CEA has looked at a number of apps—it wold definitely be worth checking with them to see how many apps they’ve considered out of the total number of apps available, and possibly follow the 37% rule.
It seems plausible, though overall not that likely, to me that maybe the LessWrong team should just build our own conference platform into the forum. We might look into that next year as we are also looking to maybe organize some conferences.
That would be interesting! I’d be interested to see if that happens—I think there are probably a benefits from integration with the LW/​EA Forum. In what scenario do you think this would be the most likely?
I think it’s most likely if the LessWrong team decides to run a conference, and then after looking into alternatives for a bit, decides that it’s best to just build our own thing.
I think it’s much more likely if LW runs a conference than if CEA runs another conference, not because I would want to prioritize a LW conference app over an EAG app, but because I expect the first version of it to be pretty janky, and I wouldn’t want to inflict that on the poor CEA team without being the people who built it directly and know in which ways it might break.