Virtual EA Global: News and updates from CEA
As you may have heard already, we’ll be holding our first Virtual EA Global instead of an in-person event this coming weekend. This will include:
A live broadcast featuring content from some of our planned speakers, which everyone is welcome to attend.
A series of “Ask Me Anything” posts on the Forum, in which anyone can ask questions.
The EA Global Broadcast
Everyone is welcome to watch the broadcast!
We encourage you to invite your friends. During this time of social distancing, when many community events have been canceled, we hope this can serve as a gathering point for EAs around the world.
It will take place from 10:30 AM to 2:30 PM Pacific Time on March 21st and 22nd. We chose these times with US and European time zones in mind, as most of our attendees live in those areas.
(Note that the US recently switched over to daylight savings time, so time zone differences outside the US may be different than for most of the year. Please check your local time to confirm.)
The agenda for the broadcast is here. A live host will provide updates and commentary during a varied programme of pre-recorded videos. On Saturday morning, you can visit the agenda page to see a link to the broadcast.
“Ask Me Anything” Sessions
Several speakers have agreed to run AMAs on the Forum in advance of the event. (For examples of past AMAs, see Will MacAskill or Rob Mather.)
In past AMAs, posters have replied to questions on the Forum. This time, they’ll be recording answers on video; we’ll stream those videos during the broadcast. They’ll also be posted on YouTube and linked from the AMA posts, so you don’t have to catch them live to view answers. Later, we’ll link to the videos from the EA Forum.
Current AMAs:
Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder and CEO of GiveWell
Leah Edgerton, Executive Director of Animal Charity Evaluators
Toby Ord, author of “The Precipice” and co-founder of the EA movement
You can subscribe to comments on any of the AMA posts; this is the best way to learn when AMA videos are posted. And if you subscribe to comments on this post, you’ll get notifications whenever a new AMA post is published.
One-on-one Meetings
We still think that individual connections between attendees are one of the most valuable aspects of the conference, and we don’t want to sacrifice that just because we aren’t gathering in person.
We are piloting the use of “virtual meeting rooms” for attendees to connect with each other via the Grip app. Attendees should have received a Grip invitation a while ago after having been accepted to EA Global; if you have not received an invitation, please contact us at hello@eaglobal.org.
To get the most out of Grip, you’ll need to fill out your profile and schedule meetings ahead of time. We recommend doing this as soon as you can, so that you’ll be prepared well in advance of the weekend.
We are very uncertain how well the “virtual meeting rooms” will work. If they are well-received, we may consider having more “virtual” events or otherwise coordinating virtual one-on-one’s in the future, possibly with a broader audience (i.e. not just those accepted to the conference).
Another way you can set up one-on-ones is to use this Forum thread, where you can share your contact information and notes on who you’d like to meet.
Enjoy the (virtual) conference!
We hope to see you at the broadcast this weekend, and asking questions on AMA posts this week! Please comment on this post or contact us if you have any questions or suggestions relating to the weekend’s events.
(We will do our best to respond to questions, but please keep in mind that we are trying to organize a new type of conference with only two weeks’ notice, and might not respond as rapidly as usual. We appreciate your patience.)
- AMA: Toby Ord, author of “The Precipice” and co-founder of the EA movement by (17 Mar 2020 2:39 UTC; 68 points)
- AMA: Leah Edgerton, Executive Director of Animal Charity Evaluators by (17 Mar 2020 2:39 UTC; 36 points)
- AMA: Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder and CEO of GiveWell by (17 Mar 2020 2:38 UTC; 28 points)
Great thinking, and impressive work putting this together so quickly!
That made me wonder if the videos are pre-recorded videos from past events, or if they’re new videos but pre-recorded rather than live streams. But the agenda seems to indicate neither, as the titles are unfamiliar to me and they’re listed as live streams. Are they indeed pre-recorded?
Also, does the nature of this event mean the videos are likely to be on YouTube sooner than normal?
Thanks for your kind words and for your question! We have a mix of content that we are testing:
AMA’s: folks asked questions on the Forum and we are conducting and recording interviews today
Talks: most of the talks are new recordings, which we will record today
“Greatest hits”: we are also showing two recordings from past EA Global conferences as a test
My welcome talk and the MC hosting by Nathan will be done live from our home in Detroit
We are trying to test a few different content types so that we can learn as much as we can for possible future events and to hopefully find some virtual content types that people really like! The videos will be combined with our live hosting via a live stream this weekend. This should mean that we can post the videos on YouTube sooner.
Sounds great, and thanks for the response!
This link should convert the event start time to your local time automatically (unless you use a VPN)
Such a cool idea, thanks for making this happen! :)
Does that mean that only people that were going to EAG SF can join the virtual meeting rooms?
Thank you!
Yes, this time the virtual meeting rooms are limited to folks who registered for EA Global SF. This type of event is all new to us and we decided to limit the matchmaking tool for now so that we can test the format and work out the bugs. I hope it works well! If it does I’ll be excited to explore rolling it out to more people later in the year.
Amy, Barry thank you for putting this together so quickly!
Am I correct in assuming that the videos will also be available after the conference? If so, can you given indication when they might be available?
I am wishing you a good kick-off of this virtual conference in a moment!
Thank you! Yes, the individual videos are all scheduled to go live immediately after the conference.
Hey Amy and Barry, thanks so much for pulling this together, and so quickly—incredible work!
I would like to use the Grip agenda website to add items to my agenda (i.e. not just view it) but it won’t let meas I haven’t registered. I fear that this means I also won’t be able to click through to the live streams when they happen. Maybe I’m just missing a registration link somewhere, but this might be a bug where only people who were actually registered for EAG SF are able to interact with the agenda (and, potentially, view the livestreams).
Just thought I’d bring this to your attention! Again, amazing work getting this event up so fast on a new platform.
ETA: I just reread and saw this:
On Saturday morning, you can visit the agenda page to see a link to the broadcast.
It’s already Saturday evening here, but I think it is not yet Saturday morning in SF! So maybe the links will appear in the agenda then. It would still be great, if the feature is simple to activate, for non-attendees to be able to add items to their agenda—but I 100% understand if this is not possible, and will just make my own agenda manually. :)
Heres’ the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXbUgvlB0Zo
Also from here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rMLFZn7JzP4mXkCaq/ea-global-live-broadcast