Tl;dr: Big conferences can be really good: warm, friendly, easy to navigate, etc. Although they might not look like the current EAG. In fact the big conference I used to go to was possibly better than EAGs at some aspects of this!
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Without opining on the general for/against I wanted to raise that a point that might be a crux for some people considering this is that I expect most people have not been to or lack a strong sense in their mind of it would look like to have a well-run community-focused 2000+ person conference which had a nice culture, that is designed to facilitate meeting on shared interests and to not be too overwhelming or impersonal.
I used to go to a big religious conference every year with at its peak maybe 2500 attendees, and it had these features. It worked as anyone could (with a bit of preplanning) add a session on anything. So at any time there were 20+ so sessions to pick from. They were not all talks and many were workshops, discussion groups, spaces to co-create projects, etc. Most of them were just put on by anyone but a few top sessions were organised by the conference team. This generally felt like a good way to meet interesting people. The conference was also a residential and 5 days long. Sessions went from 8am to 1am and there was always a a lot of socialising too. There was also childcare throughout. It needed a lot of volunteers to run but volunteering was also a good way to meet others and get a discounted price. It was not at all selective.
If anything I think it is possible that 500+ person EAGs could work better if they shifted to this kind of event: a longer event with meetings happening at a workshop / talk / discussion group rather than on an app as (at least for me) it is almost impossible to find the people to connect to on the app if you do not already know those people, and almost impossible to meet them all in a 2 day conference anyway.
Tl;dr: Big conferences can be really good: warm, friendly, easy to navigate, etc. Although they might not look like the current EAG. In fact the big conference I used to go to was possibly better than EAGs at some aspects of this!
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Without opining on the general for/against I wanted to raise that a point that might be a crux for some people considering this is that I expect most people have not been to or lack a strong sense in their mind of it would look like to have a well-run community-focused 2000+ person conference which had a nice culture, that is designed to facilitate meeting on shared interests and to not be too overwhelming or impersonal.
I used to go to a big religious conference every year with at its peak maybe 2500 attendees, and it had these features. It worked as anyone could (with a bit of preplanning) add a session on anything. So at any time there were 20+ so sessions to pick from. They were not all talks and many were workshops, discussion groups, spaces to co-create projects, etc. Most of them were just put on by anyone but a few top sessions were organised by the conference team. This generally felt like a good way to meet interesting people. The conference was also a residential and 5 days long. Sessions went from 8am to 1am and there was always a a lot of socialising too. There was also childcare throughout. It needed a lot of volunteers to run but volunteering was also a good way to meet others and get a discounted price. It was not at all selective.
If anything I think it is possible that 500+ person EAGs could work better if they shifted to this kind of event: a longer event with meetings happening at a workshop / talk / discussion group rather than on an app as (at least for me) it is almost impossible to find the people to connect to on the app if you do not already know those people, and almost impossible to meet them all in a 2 day conference anyway.