I understand the difficulty of running events, and it’s not clear to me how EAGxSingapore could be done better. Looking at the suggestions you gave, for example:
1) Local community contact: I can see that they likely understand local customs and norms better. But I also see that EA is a global community of a unique culture that is much closer to the West.
2) Clearer communication of the roles. It would’ve been a big reliever for ME if I knew that community health contact was just a minor part of Ollie’s roles. And as Dion explained in her response above, now I understand he walked around not to monitor us, but on the lookout for trash. Not only now I feel stupid, but also that I underappreciated Ollie’s efforts. But I digress. In a large event like EAGx, many details have impacts on the participants’ experiences, including the length of the communication of these details. I am not sure whether it is worth making the point of “community health staff usually have other more important roles”.
Most measures I can imagine right now, are like the two above where the choice is not clear, but an intricate balance of various considerations. Therefore I have to admit that even if I had a somewhat negative experience myself, I don’t have any good suggestions for improvement.
Finally let me mention that I am positively surprised to see your response to my rant deeply buried in a thread of 100+ comments. I am confident that with this level of care and dedication, EA events can only better and will have increasingly larger impacts for the good of the participants!
Thanks so much for your kind response Jonathan! I’ll be discussing ways to explain the role better with the next community contact people . I hope we can prevent future attendees from experiencing the discomfort you felt.
Hi Catherine,
Thank you for reading my comment!
I understand the difficulty of running events, and it’s not clear to me how EAGxSingapore could be done better. Looking at the suggestions you gave, for example:
1) Local community contact: I can see that they likely understand local customs and norms better. But I also see that EA is a global community of a unique culture that is much closer to the West.
2) Clearer communication of the roles. It would’ve been a big reliever for ME if I knew that community health contact was just a minor part of Ollie’s roles. And as Dion explained in her response above, now I understand he walked around not to monitor us, but on the lookout for trash. Not only now I feel stupid, but also that I underappreciated Ollie’s efforts. But I digress. In a large event like EAGx, many details have impacts on the participants’ experiences, including the length of the communication of these details. I am not sure whether it is worth making the point of “community health staff usually have other more important roles”.
Most measures I can imagine right now, are like the two above where the choice is not clear, but an intricate balance of various considerations. Therefore I have to admit that even if I had a somewhat negative experience myself, I don’t have any good suggestions for improvement.
Finally let me mention that I am positively surprised to see your response to my rant deeply buried in a thread of 100+ comments. I am confident that with this level of care and dedication, EA events can only better and will have increasingly larger impacts for the good of the participants!
Thanks so much for your kind response Jonathan!
I’ll be discussing ways to explain the role better with the next community contact people . I hope we can prevent future attendees from experiencing the discomfort you felt.