I just returned from EAG NYC, which exceeded my expectations—it might have been the most useful and enjoyable EAG for me so far.
Ofc, it wouldn’t be an EAG without inexperienced event organisers complaining about features of the conference (without mentioning it in the feedback form), so to continue that long tradition here is an anti-1:1s take.
EAGs are focused on 1:1s to a pretty extreme degree. It’s common for my friends to have 10-15 30 minute 1:1s per day, at other conferences I’ve been to it’s generally more like 0-5. I would prefer a culture of closer to 5 1:1s per day, with half of them organised after the conference starts.
Some upsides of my imaginary system relative to the current system:
Far less tiring for attendees
Far more opportunity to use earlier conversations to inform later ones (e.g. you could have a new project idea, then talk to a collaborator about it, then secure funding all at the conference)
More opportunities for small group conversations, which are extremely hard to organise in Swapcard and, in my opinion, are much more valuable than 1:1s.
Less planning overhead, where you need to start booking meetings very early so that people still have time in their calendars (and regular pre-con visits to swapcard to see who has recently joined the platform)
Some concrete recommendations to try at the next EAG could be:
Figure out how to make group conversations easier to organise (maybe ditch swapcard and online makes their own platform??)
Block out every 2nd or 3rd session by default.
Create nice zones for spontaneous conversations (not sure how to do this well) or set up the space with more nooks for organic conversations (or maybe have high effort after parties with more of this vibe)
Encourage attendees to keep at least half the schedule free till after the first day.
I’m not sure what actions I plan to take at an individual level, it feels like it’s hard for me to realise something like the above vision just for myself. Some options that I feel pretty good about trying include:
budget 3x more time for scheduling and make more small group conversations happen
block out lots of time in swapcard (though it’s not super useful if others don’t do this too)
think of lower downside interventions and lobby the EAG team to try them out—one issue is that I’m not sure I have any interventions that result in better feedback form scores in the short-term—even if the change is better in the long term.
P.S. Thanks again to the EAG team for another excellent conference!
My impression is EAGx Prague 22 managed to balance 1:1s with other content simply by not offering SwapCard 1:1s slots part of the time, having a lot of spaces for small group conversations, and suggesting to attendees they should aim for something like balanced diet. (Turning off SwapCard slots does not prevent people from scheduling 1:1, just adds a little friction; empirically it seems enough to prevent the mode where people just fill their time by 1:1s).
As far as I understand this will most likely not happen, because weight given to / goodharting on metrics like people reporting 1:1s is the most valuable use of time, metrics tracking “connections formed” and weird psychological effect of 1:1 fests. (People feel stimulated, connected, energized,… Part of the effect is superficial). Also the counterfactual value lost from lack of conversational energy at scales ~3 to 12ppl is not visible and likely not tracked in feedback (I think this has predictable effects on what types of collaborations do start and which do not, and the effect is on the margin bad.) The whole is downstream of problems like Don’t Over-Optimize Things / We can do better than argmax.
Btw I think you are too apologetic / self-deprecating (“inexperienced event organisers complaining about features of the conference”). I have decent experience running events and all what you wrote is spot on.
Thanks Jan, I appreciate this comment. I’m on the EAG team, but responding with my personal thoughts.
While it’s true that we weight 1:1s heavily in assessing EAG, I don’t think we’re doing ‘argmax prioritisation’—we still run talks, workshops, meetups, and ~1/4 of our team time goes to this. My read of your argument is that we’re scoring things wrong and should give more consideration to the impact of group conversation. You’re right that we don’t currently explicitly track the impact of group conversations, which could mean we’re missing significant value.
I do plan to think more about how we can make these group conversations happen and measure their success. I haven’t yet heard a suggestion (in this thread or elsewhere) that I believe would sufficiently move the needle, but maybe this is because we’re over-optimising for better feedback survey scores in the short term (e.g., we’ll upset some attendees if we turn off specific 1:1 slots).
i think that a happy medium is getting small-group conversations (that are useful, effective, etc) of size 3–4 people. this includes 1-1s, but the vibe of a Formal, Thirty Minute One on One is a very different vibe from floating through 10–15, 3–4-person conversations in a day, each that last varying amounts of time.
much more information can flow with 3-4 ppl than with just 2 ppl
people can dip in and out of small conversations more than they can with 1-1s
more-organic time blocks means that particularly unhelpful conversations can end after 5-10m, and particularly helpful ones can last the duration that would be good for them to last (even many hours!)
3-4 person conversations naturally select for a good 1-1. once 1-2 people have left a 3-4 person conversation, the conversation is then just a 1-1 of the two people who’ve engaged in the conversation longest — which seems like some evidence of their being a good match for a 1-1.
however, i think that this is operationally much harder to do for organizers than just 1-1s. my understanding is that this is much of the reason EAGs (& other conferences) do 1-1s, instead of small group conversations.
i think Writehaven did a mediocre job of this at LessOnline this past year (but, tbc, it did vastly better than any other piece of software i’ve encountered).
i think Lighthaven as a venue forces this sort of thing to happen, since there are so so so many nooks for 2-4 people to sit and chat, and the space is set up to make 10+ person conversations less likely to happen.
i know that The Curve (from @Rachel Weinberg) created some “Curated Conversations:” they manually selected people to have predetermined conversations for some set amount of time. iirc this was typically 3-6 people for ~1h, but i could be wrong on the details. rachel: how did these end up going, relative to the cost of putting them together?
Create nice zones for spontaneous conversations (not sure how to do this well)
I’ve tried pushing for this without much success unfortunately.
It really is a lot more effort to have spontaneous conversations when almost all pairs are a one-on-one and almost all people by themselves are waiting for a one-on-one.
I’ve seen attempts to declare a space an area that’s not for one-on-ones, but people have one-on-ones there anyway. Then again, organisers normally put up one or two small signs.
Honestly, the only way to stop people having one-on-ones in the area for spontaneous conversation might be to have an absurd number of big and obvious signs.
Yeah I also think hanging out in a no 1:1s area is weirdly low status/unexciting. I’d be a bit more excited about cause or interest specific areas like “talk about ambitious project ideas”.
I completely agree and have tried so set up some small group meetings—you can have up to 24 people in one 1:1 meeting on swapcard. This works especially well if you create a 1:1 with one person and then add others rather than immediately creating one with 24 people because the latter does not show you whether invitees are actually free at the planned time while the former does.
On the organiser side, it might be cool to move the cause area/work specific meetups earlier in the conference.
I’ve “only” been to 2 EAGs and 4 EAGx’s so take this with that as context
For previous EAGs I always booked my schedule full of 1-1′s to ask people about their experience, resolve uncertainties, and just generally network with people in similar roles. This EAG (NYC 2025) I didn’t find as many people on Swapcard that I wanted to talk to and received much less requests for 1-1s, so I also ended up having just 7 1-1s in total. This was a fun experiment. I found it much more relaxed, and I enjoyed being able to have spontaneous conversations with people I ran into, but I think overall I got less value out of this EAG than if I had booked more meetings: I have less actionable insights and met less people than during other EAG(x) conferences I have attended. However, I’m definitely in favour of less 1-1 cramming.
I do think if this was one of my first EAGs and I didn’t know anyone, I would’ve been quite lost without the structure of the 1-1′s and the explicit encouragement that it is normal to book a lot. I also feel weird about just joining a conversation in case it was people having a private 1-1. Having an improved spontaneous conversations area with bigger signs/cause area specific areas (or time slots?) sounds like a great solution for both of these problems.
Tangentially, my favourite meetups are also those where you just stand and mingle, ideally with specific areas in specific corners, rather than do forced speed meets or roundtable discussions. This makes it much easier to leave if you don’t like a conversation and move on to a different one until you find one you like.
(Weakly) Against 1:1 Fests
I just returned from EAG NYC, which exceeded my expectations—it might have been the most useful and enjoyable EAG for me so far.
Ofc, it wouldn’t be an EAG without inexperienced event organisers complaining about features of the conference (without mentioning it in the feedback form), so to continue that long tradition here is an anti-1:1s take.
EAGs are focused on 1:1s to a pretty extreme degree. It’s common for my friends to have 10-15 30 minute 1:1s per day, at other conferences I’ve been to it’s generally more like 0-5. I would prefer a culture of closer to 5 1:1s per day, with half of them organised after the conference starts.
Some upsides of my imaginary system relative to the current system:
Far less tiring for attendees
Far more opportunity to use earlier conversations to inform later ones (e.g. you could have a new project idea, then talk to a collaborator about it, then secure funding all at the conference)
More opportunities for small group conversations, which are extremely hard to organise in Swapcard and, in my opinion, are much more valuable than 1:1s.
Less planning overhead, where you need to start booking meetings very early so that people still have time in their calendars (and regular pre-con visits to swapcard to see who has recently joined the platform)
Some concrete recommendations to try at the next EAG could be:
Figure out how to make group conversations easier to organise (maybe ditch swapcard and online makes their own platform??)
Block out every 2nd or 3rd session by default.
Create nice zones for spontaneous conversations (not sure how to do this well) or set up the space with more nooks for organic conversations (or maybe have high effort after parties with more of this vibe)
Encourage attendees to keep at least half the schedule free till after the first day.
I’m not sure what actions I plan to take at an individual level, it feels like it’s hard for me to realise something like the above vision just for myself. Some options that I feel pretty good about trying include:
budget 3x more time for scheduling and make more small group conversations happen
block out lots of time in swapcard (though it’s not super useful if others don’t do this too)
think of lower downside interventions and lobby the EAG team to try them out—one issue is that I’m not sure I have any interventions that result in better feedback form scores in the short-term—even if the change is better in the long term.
P.S. Thanks again to the EAG team for another excellent conference!
My impression is EAGx Prague 22 managed to balance 1:1s with other content simply by not offering SwapCard 1:1s slots part of the time, having a lot of spaces for small group conversations, and suggesting to attendees they should aim for something like balanced diet. (Turning off SwapCard slots does not prevent people from scheduling 1:1, just adds a little friction; empirically it seems enough to prevent the mode where people just fill their time by 1:1s).
As far as I understand this will most likely not happen, because weight given to / goodharting on metrics like people reporting 1:1s is the most valuable use of time, metrics tracking “connections formed” and weird psychological effect of 1:1 fests. (People feel stimulated, connected, energized,… Part of the effect is superficial). Also the counterfactual value lost from lack of conversational energy at scales ~3 to 12ppl is not visible and likely not tracked in feedback (I think this has predictable effects on what types of collaborations do start and which do not, and the effect is on the margin bad.) The whole is downstream of problems like Don’t Over-Optimize Things / We can do better than argmax.
Btw I think you are too apologetic / self-deprecating (“inexperienced event organisers complaining about features of the conference”). I have decent experience running events and all what you wrote is spot on.
Thanks Jan, I appreciate this comment. I’m on the EAG team, but responding with my personal thoughts.
While it’s true that we weight 1:1s heavily in assessing EAG, I don’t think we’re doing ‘argmax prioritisation’—we still run talks, workshops, meetups, and ~1/4 of our team time goes to this. My read of your argument is that we’re scoring things wrong and should give more consideration to the impact of group conversation. You’re right that we don’t currently explicitly track the impact of group conversations, which could mean we’re missing significant value.
I do plan to think more about how we can make these group conversations happen and measure their success. I haven’t yet heard a suggestion (in this thread or elsewhere) that I believe would sufficiently move the needle, but maybe this is because we’re over-optimising for better feedback survey scores in the short term (e.g., we’ll upset some attendees if we turn off specific 1:1 slots).
(written v quickly, sorry for informal tone/etc)
i think that a happy medium is getting small-group conversations (that are useful, effective, etc) of size 3–4 people. this includes 1-1s, but the vibe of a Formal, Thirty Minute One on One is a very different vibe from floating through 10–15, 3–4-person conversations in a day, each that last varying amounts of time.
much more information can flow with 3-4 ppl than with just 2 ppl
people can dip in and out of small conversations more than they can with 1-1s
more-organic time blocks means that particularly unhelpful conversations can end after 5-10m, and particularly helpful ones can last the duration that would be good for them to last (even many hours!)
3-4 person conversations naturally select for a good 1-1. once 1-2 people have left a 3-4 person conversation, the conversation is then just a 1-1 of the two people who’ve engaged in the conversation longest — which seems like some evidence of their being a good match for a 1-1.
however, i think that this is operationally much harder to do for organizers than just 1-1s. my understanding is that this is much of the reason EAGs (& other conferences) do 1-1s, instead of small group conversations.
i think Writehaven did a mediocre job of this at LessOnline this past year (but, tbc, it did vastly better than any other piece of software i’ve encountered).
i think Lighthaven as a venue forces this sort of thing to happen, since there are so so so many nooks for 2-4 people to sit and chat, and the space is set up to make 10+ person conversations less likely to happen.
i know that The Curve (from @Rachel Weinberg) created some “Curated Conversations:” they manually selected people to have predetermined conversations for some set amount of time. iirc this was typically 3-6 people for ~1h, but i could be wrong on the details. rachel: how did these end up going, relative to the cost of putting them together?
I’ve tried pushing for this without much success unfortunately.
It really is a lot more effort to have spontaneous conversations when almost all pairs are a one-on-one and almost all people by themselves are waiting for a one-on-one.
I’ve seen attempts to declare a space an area that’s not for one-on-ones, but people have one-on-ones there anyway. Then again, organisers normally put up one or two small signs.
Honestly, the only way to stop people having one-on-ones in the area for spontaneous conversation might be to have an absurd number of big and obvious signs.
Yeah I also think hanging out in a no 1:1s area is weirdly low status/unexciting. I’d be a bit more excited about cause or interest specific areas like “talk about ambitious project ideas”.
I completely agree and have tried so set up some small group meetings—you can have up to 24 people in one 1:1 meeting on swapcard. This works especially well if you create a 1:1 with one person and then add others rather than immediately creating one with 24 people because the latter does not show you whether invitees are actually free at the planned time while the former does.
On the organiser side, it might be cool to move the cause area/work specific meetups earlier in the conference.
I’ve “only” been to 2 EAGs and 4 EAGx’s so take this with that as context
For previous EAGs I always booked my schedule full of 1-1′s to ask people about their experience, resolve uncertainties, and just generally network with people in similar roles. This EAG (NYC 2025) I didn’t find as many people on Swapcard that I wanted to talk to and received much less requests for 1-1s, so I also ended up having just 7 1-1s in total. This was a fun experiment. I found it much more relaxed, and I enjoyed being able to have spontaneous conversations with people I ran into, but I think overall I got less value out of this EAG than if I had booked more meetings: I have less actionable insights and met less people than during other EAG(x) conferences I have attended. However, I’m definitely in favour of less 1-1 cramming.
I do think if this was one of my first EAGs and I didn’t know anyone, I would’ve been quite lost without the structure of the 1-1′s and the explicit encouragement that it is normal to book a lot. I also feel weird about just joining a conversation in case it was people having a private 1-1. Having an improved spontaneous conversations area with bigger signs/cause area specific areas (or time slots?) sounds like a great solution for both of these problems.
Tangentially, my favourite meetups are also those where you just stand and mingle, ideally with specific areas in specific corners, rather than do forced speed meets or roundtable discussions. This makes it much easier to leave if you don’t like a conversation and move on to a different one until you find one you like.