Thanks for posting this and thanks for the feedback.
Speaking just for myself, I made three useful updates from this post and from reflecting on EAGx overall.
1) Having Roxanne be the only person on the EAO team directly responsible for EAGx while in school was probably asking too much of her. Roxanne is extremely capable, but the amount of work this entailed was more than could be reasonably expected. I think this is classic planning fallacy on the EAO team’s part.
2) I think it was a mistake to run both EAGxBerkeley and EAGxBoston at the same time, as our first EAGx events. We knew this would be tough at the time but probably should have either declined one of the two events or made it clear that our level of support would be lower than it might be usually.
3) Finally, my biggest update is that clarifying what a person running a project can and cannot do unilaterally is more important than I expected. Many of the situations described here happened in the communications interchange going from the EAGxBerkeley team to Roxanne, to others at EAO and back again. I should have made it clear to Roxanne what situations she should ask for advice and what situations she should ask for permission. Had I empowered Rox to make a few more decisions unilaterally, I think things would have gone a bit smoother.
By the way, the EAO team merged into CEA shortly before Effective Altruism Global. Members of the team are now working under CEA’s Community and Outreach team headed by Tara. Most of the EAO team’s projects (including EAGx) will continue under the new structure.
Thanks for posting this and thanks for the feedback.
Speaking just for myself, I made three useful updates from this post and from reflecting on EAGx overall.
1) Having Roxanne be the only person on the EAO team directly responsible for EAGx while in school was probably asking too much of her. Roxanne is extremely capable, but the amount of work this entailed was more than could be reasonably expected. I think this is classic planning fallacy on the EAO team’s part.
2) I think it was a mistake to run both EAGxBerkeley and EAGxBoston at the same time, as our first EAGx events. We knew this would be tough at the time but probably should have either declined one of the two events or made it clear that our level of support would be lower than it might be usually.
3) Finally, my biggest update is that clarifying what a person running a project can and cannot do unilaterally is more important than I expected. Many of the situations described here happened in the communications interchange going from the EAGxBerkeley team to Roxanne, to others at EAO and back again. I should have made it clear to Roxanne what situations she should ask for advice and what situations she should ask for permission. Had I empowered Rox to make a few more decisions unilaterally, I think things would have gone a bit smoother.
By the way, the EAO team merged into CEA shortly before Effective Altruism Global. Members of the team are now working under CEA’s Community and Outreach team headed by Tara. Most of the EAO team’s projects (including EAGx) will continue under the new structure.