I’m not aware of the American context, are there city-specific retreats? Or is there a California retreat, an Orgegon retreat, etc?
I was quite surprised to hear you say you want to filter people more in the future, even “multiple organizer interviews, or an application + interview”. I’ve been to more retreats than I can count (outside the US) and have never had an interview. Don’t you want to use the retreat as an opportunity to get new people involved and enthusiastic about EA? I would have thought that’s a much bigger value add than slightly better networking opportunities for people who are already deep into EA.
this was a retreat for west coast ea uni students — we focused on LA & Bay Area schools, but would’ve been happy to have e.g. oregon schools there too.
re: filtering, our main reflection here was that, given an existing pool of high-context folks, retreats can be a useful way for those folks to coordinate & get to know each other better in ways that are hard to replicate elsewhere. and although it’s possible to use retreats to help newcomers get acquainted to EA, we thought other pathways (intro fellowships, 1:1s with organizers, reading intro material online, etc) would be more effective/scalable for newcomers, while avoiding the problem of making the whole ambient atmosphere lower context.
so — we definitely don’t think all retreats should filter out newcomers, just that retreats which do some filtering will be able to provide benefits to attendees that retreats which don’t do filtering won’t be able to provide.
maybe a relevant analogy here is EAGs vs EAGx’s: the former has a higher bar, but both are super useful at what they’re aiming for.
Thanks for this post!
I’m not aware of the American context, are there city-specific retreats? Or is there a California retreat, an Orgegon retreat, etc?
I was quite surprised to hear you say you want to filter people more in the future, even “multiple organizer interviews, or an application + interview”. I’ve been to more retreats than I can count (outside the US) and have never had an interview. Don’t you want to use the retreat as an opportunity to get new people involved and enthusiastic about EA? I would have thought that’s a much bigger value add than slightly better networking opportunities for people who are already deep into EA.
hey, thanks for commenting!
this was a retreat for west coast ea uni students — we focused on LA & Bay Area schools, but would’ve been happy to have e.g. oregon schools there too.
re: filtering, our main reflection here was that, given an existing pool of high-context folks, retreats can be a useful way for those folks to coordinate & get to know each other better in ways that are hard to replicate elsewhere. and although it’s possible to use retreats to help newcomers get acquainted to EA, we thought other pathways (intro fellowships, 1:1s with organizers, reading intro material online, etc) would be more effective/scalable for newcomers, while avoiding the problem of making the whole ambient atmosphere lower context.
so — we definitely don’t think all retreats should filter out newcomers, just that retreats which do some filtering will be able to provide benefits to attendees that retreats which don’t do filtering won’t be able to provide.
maybe a relevant analogy here is EAGs vs EAGx’s: the former has a higher bar, but both are super useful at what they’re aiming for.