Preparing for EAGxPrague
I signed up for EAGxPrague somewhat last minute and am wondering what the best channel to ask questions and connect with fellow attendees is. This is my first EA conference and post on this form, so please go easy on me if I’m missing the obvious.
The post How to Make Your First EAG a Success recommends scheduling 1:1′s and mentions an app. Is this applicable to EAGxPrague? I’ve not seen any mention of an app for this conference.
One thing I’m wondering about is at what time the conference starts. As far as I can tell the web pages and emails only mention the days. This seems like a good question for some chat channel. Is there a chat, or other communication channel, dedicated to this conference?
My recommendations for EAG(x) events are here
Based on 2 events I was at, both were pretty significant for me, and I think the preparation I did mattered a lot
Great that you’re coming! I’m helping organise.
The conference app is being set up now and will be launched soon :)
I believe the conference will open Friday evening, I’ll nudge the organisers to post the schedule somewhere more public.
You can chat on the app once it’s launched, there’s also a Facebook event :)
I’m not going to EAGxPrague—but from my experience at other conferences, they usually start Friday evening with an opening reception and a career fair. All the conferences I’ve been to have used Swapcard, but it hasn’t been made public until about a week before the event. If you haven’t heard anything and it’s a few days before the event, I would reach out to the organisers because some people at EAGxBoston didn’t get the email about the Swapcard. Hope this helps!
As Elika mentioned, this is SwapCard. It has some clunkiness, but overall works[1]. You should get an email about it about ~week out.
The strategy of 1:1 scheduling is complicated and there’s different “schools of thoughts” on this and I’ve heard from someone who went to EAGs who have different perspectives.
Some tips:
Once you get on SwapCard, write a nice, concise profile that describes your interests and activities (tone, style is hard, maybe start by mimicking the style of other people, in a proportionate way). It’s tricky but cover your interests and be brief at the same time.
I recommend scheduling as many 1:1s with interesting and relevant people as you can, writing a succinct, honest message to introduce yourself and what you are trying to get out of talking with them.
For most new EAs, I recommend scheduling reaching out aggressively—a typical pattern that newcomers have mentioned is being shy about this, and then they get “left out” inadvertently.
Typically the scheduled events on days go from 9 AM and end near 6pm, but can go late, even 9 PM.
(Again, there’s different schools of thought about 1:1s, and you can write multiple essays about this), but for many people, the event and demands are mostly driven by 1:1s, so it’s sort of what you get out of it.
I know someone who has gone to some conferences. From this knowledge, I think there is a Slack for EAs where you can get questions answered quicker (sometimes by event staff) and there’s some prior discussion. It seems good not to directly publicize the Slack (it’s sort of de facto or something). Please PM me if you are interested.
There’s a lot more to write here and a lot of advice to give (afterparties, peripheral events).
I guess I can have someone write up their experiences of EAG, but their experience is sort of different.
People do slag SwapCard a bit, but there’s a lot going on and important to be fair.
In one situation at a conference, meetings were occurring in two separate buildings with 5-10 minute walk. To get this sorted, you kind of need to have a multi monitor setup. Using the SwapCard or setting up invitations on the phone during the event is clunky.
This is a hard problem and not a huge defect on the staff or organizers.
I think a wholesale SwapCard replacement might be viable and useful to EA (the main limiter is the founder/leadership and developer and DevOps demands, which are all sort of precious at the given moment).