+100 on this. I think the screening processes for these conferences overweight legible in-groupy accomplishments like organizing an EA group in your local town/college, and underweights regular impressive people like startup founders who are EA-curious—and this is really really bad for movement diversity.
Yes, I might be salty because I was rejected from both EAG London and Future Forum this year…
But I also think the bar for me introducing friends to EA-curious is higher, because there isn’t a cool thing I can invite them into. Anime conventions such as Anime Expo or Crunchyroll Expo are the opposite of this—everyone is welcome, bring your friends, have a good time—and it works out quite well for keeping people interested in the subject.
I think anime/gaming expos/conventions might be a good example actually—in those events, the density of high quality people is less important than just “open for anyone who’s interested to come”. Like, organizers will try to have speakers and guests lined up who are established/legit, but 98% of the people visiting are just fans of anime who want to talk to other fans.
Notably, it’s not where industry experts converge to do productive work on creating things, or do 1:1s; but they sure do take advantage of cons and expos to market their new work to audiences. By analogy, a much larger EA Expo would have the advantage of promoting the newest ideas to a wider subset of the movement.
Plus, you get really cool emergent dynamics when the audience size is 10x’d. For example, if there are a 1-2 people in 1000 who enjoy creating EA art, at 10000 people you can have 10-20 of them get together and meetup and talk to each other
Super seconded! I have had a couple of EA-curious friends (who would be a great fit for EA, very passionate and smart and dedicated to positively impacting the world) ask if I would recommend attending a conference, and had to awkwardly explain that although I loved my experience at EAG, they would probably not get in. I was able to recommend EAGx as a more accessible alternative, but the American EAGx conferences are pretty student-oriented, still have illegible admissions criteria, and wouldn’t necessarily present the benefits of EAG as efficiently to post-grads. There NEEDS to be an accessible event I can invite people to. ETA: I think it’s fine to have events with different levels of accessibility, it’s just frustrating that the current combo doesn’t really provide a good entry point/thing to invite people to. Making admissions criteria more legible, especially for EAGx, could help address this.
+100 on this. I think the screening processes for these conferences overweight legible in-groupy accomplishments like organizing an EA group in your local town/college, and underweights regular impressive people like startup founders who are EA-curious—and this is really really bad for movement diversity.
Yes, I might be salty because I was rejected from both EAG London and Future Forum this year…
But I also think the bar for me introducing friends to EA-curious is higher, because there isn’t a cool thing I can invite them into. Anime conventions such as Anime Expo or Crunchyroll Expo are the opposite of this—everyone is welcome, bring your friends, have a good time—and it works out quite well for keeping people interested in the subject.
I like the idea of an EA expo as a different thing!
Though I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of more established EAs didn’t want to go and people felt sad about how EA expo isn’t legit enough.
I think anime/gaming expos/conventions might be a good example actually—in those events, the density of high quality people is less important than just “open for anyone who’s interested to come”. Like, organizers will try to have speakers and guests lined up who are established/legit, but 98% of the people visiting are just fans of anime who want to talk to other fans.
Notably, it’s not where industry experts converge to do productive work on creating things, or do 1:1s; but they sure do take advantage of cons and expos to market their new work to audiences. By analogy, a much larger EA Expo would have the advantage of promoting the newest ideas to a wider subset of the movement.
Plus, you get really cool emergent dynamics when the audience size is 10x’d. For example, if there are a 1-2 people in 1000 who enjoy creating EA art, at 10000 people you can have 10-20 of them get together and meetup and talk to each other
Super seconded! I have had a couple of EA-curious friends (who would be a great fit for EA, very passionate and smart and dedicated to positively impacting the world) ask if I would recommend attending a conference, and had to awkwardly explain that although I loved my experience at EAG, they would probably not get in. I was able to recommend EAGx as a more accessible alternative, but the American EAGx conferences are pretty student-oriented, still have illegible admissions criteria, and wouldn’t necessarily present the benefits of EAG as efficiently to post-grads. There NEEDS to be an accessible event I can invite people to. ETA: I think it’s fine to have events with different levels of accessibility, it’s just frustrating that the current combo doesn’t really provide a good entry point/thing to invite people to. Making admissions criteria more legible, especially for EAGx, could help address this.