First, I should clarify that the event descriptions aren’t meant to suggest that the focus / themes will be the only thing discussed at the conference. We expect to have people who are interested in all of these things to all of the conferences. We will have workshops and community driven content, some core EA concepts, and some things that would fall into the category of “pushing the frontiers” at each.
We have themes because it is helpful for focussing the events, for getting people excited, and for encouraging people to attend more than one event. Having themes also allows us to attract more potential EAs who might not attend a “standard EA conference”. Our themes selections are based on the geographic locations to some degree: the Bay Area hosted the main event for a number of years and seems well-suited for community driven content, Boston / Cambridge is home to Harvard, MIT, MIT Media Lab, Tufts, etc and London / Oxford is home of philosophical EA.
Thanks for your question!
First, I should clarify that the event descriptions aren’t meant to suggest that the focus / themes will be the only thing discussed at the conference. We expect to have people who are interested in all of these things to all of the conferences. We will have workshops and community driven content, some core EA concepts, and some things that would fall into the category of “pushing the frontiers” at each.
We have themes because it is helpful for focussing the events, for getting people excited, and for encouraging people to attend more than one event. Having themes also allows us to attract more potential EAs who might not attend a “standard EA conference”. Our themes selections are based on the geographic locations to some degree: the Bay Area hosted the main event for a number of years and seems well-suited for community driven content, Boston / Cambridge is home to Harvard, MIT, MIT Media Lab, Tufts, etc and London / Oxford is home of philosophical EA.