Thanks for writing this up! I’d be interested if you had time to say more about what you think the main theory of change of the event was (or should have been).
What I’ll say should be taken more as representative of how I’ve been thinking, than of how CEA or other people think about it.
These were our objectives, in order:
1: Connect the EA UK community.
2: Welcome and integrate less well-connected members of the community. Reduce the social distance within the UK EA community.
3: Inspire people to take action based on high-quality reasoning.
The main emphasis was on 1, where the theory of impact is something like:
The EA community will achieve more by working together than they will by working as individuals; facilitating people to build connections makes collaboration more likely. Some valuable kinds of connections might be: mentoring relationships, coworking, cofounding, research collabs, and not least friendships (for keeping up one’s motivation to do good).
We added other goals beyond connecting people, since a lot of changes to plans will come from one-off interactions (or even exposures to content); I think of someone deciding to apply for funding after attending a workshop on how to do that.
Plausibly though, longer-lasting, deeper connections dominate the calculation, because of the ‘heavy tail’ of deep collaborations, such as an intern hire I heard of which resulted from this conference.
I’ll tag @OllieBase (CEA Events) in case he wants to give his own answer to this question.
The guidance I give to EAGx organisers about goals is:
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We support EAGx events primarily to connect the community. Deep collaborations, within and between community members, seem key to achieving many of the goals the community has. We think that we can form more of these collaborations by helping people meet others who might be useful collaborators.
However, there are other important goals that EAGx events are particularly well-placed to serve:
Introducing attendees to ideas which can help them find their path to solving pressing problems. Broadly speaking, events help people navigate both the people and the ideas in the community;
Building the social network of attendees, particularly those who are new to the community; and
Establishing new EA hubs—EAGx events often serve as the seed for future community-building in that country or city.
Feel free to set further goals specific to your conference (“e.g. re-animate the national EA group”).
Thanks David, that’s just the kind of reply I was hoping for! Those three goals do seem to me like three of the most important. It might be worth adding that context to your write-up.
I’m curious whether there’s much you did specifically to achieve your third goal—inspiring people to take action based on high quality reasoning—beyond just running an event where people might talk to others who are doing that. I wouldn’t expect so, but I’d be interested there was.
We did encourage speakers to include action points and action-relevant information in their content, and tried to prioritise action-relevant workshops (e.g. “what it takes to found a charity”); I think that’s about all. Thanks for the tip to include the goals in the write-up.
Thanks for writing this up! I’d be interested if you had time to say more about what you think the main theory of change of the event was (or should have been).
What I’ll say should be taken more as representative of how I’ve been thinking, than of how CEA or other people think about it.
These were our objectives, in order:
1: Connect the EA UK community.
2: Welcome and integrate less well-connected members of the community. Reduce the social distance within the UK EA community.
3: Inspire people to take action based on high-quality reasoning.
The main emphasis was on 1, where the theory of impact is something like:
The EA community will achieve more by working together than they will by working as individuals; facilitating people to build connections makes collaboration more likely. Some valuable kinds of connections might be: mentoring relationships, coworking, cofounding, research collabs, and not least friendships (for keeping up one’s motivation to do good).
We added other goals beyond connecting people, since a lot of changes to plans will come from one-off interactions (or even exposures to content); I think of someone deciding to apply for funding after attending a workshop on how to do that.
Plausibly though, longer-lasting, deeper connections dominate the calculation, because of the ‘heavy tail’ of deep collaborations, such as an intern hire I heard of which resulted from this conference.
I’ll tag @OllieBase (CEA Events) in case he wants to give his own answer to this question.
I thought these goals were reasonable!
The guidance I give to EAGx organisers about goals is:
--
We support EAGx events primarily to connect the community. Deep collaborations, within and between community members, seem key to achieving many of the goals the community has. We think that we can form more of these collaborations by helping people meet others who might be useful collaborators.
However, there are other important goals that EAGx events are particularly well-placed to serve:
Introducing attendees to ideas which can help them find their path to solving pressing problems. Broadly speaking, events help people navigate both the people and the ideas in the community;
Building the social network of attendees, particularly those who are new to the community; and
Establishing new EA hubs—EAGx events often serve as the seed for future community-building in that country or city.
Feel free to set further goals specific to your conference (“e.g. re-animate the national EA group”).
Thanks David, that’s just the kind of reply I was hoping for! Those three goals do seem to me like three of the most important. It might be worth adding that context to your write-up.
I’m curious whether there’s much you did specifically to achieve your third goal—inspiring people to take action based on high quality reasoning—beyond just running an event where people might talk to others who are doing that. I wouldn’t expect so, but I’d be interested there was.
We did encourage speakers to include action points and action-relevant information in their content, and tried to prioritise action-relevant workshops (e.g. “what it takes to found a charity”); I think that’s about all. Thanks for the tip to include the goals in the write-up.