Hi Jonathan, I’m Catherine from CEA’s Community Health team. Thanks so much for sharing your experience, and I’m so sorry you felt uncomfortable.
A minor clarification: Each EAG or EAGx conference has a community contact person (or two). They are sometimes members of CEA’s community health team, but often they are either members of the local EA community or are members of CEA’s events team. It is not our intention for people to feel that they are being monitored.
I believe the person you are referring to is Ollie from CEA’s events team, whose role is to support the local organisers of EAGx events. He was walking around the venue to ensure the event was running smoothly and help out when needed.
Ollie was one of the two community contact people for EAGxSingapore, and a Singaporean organiser was the other contact person. This contact person role was a minor part of both of their roles that weekend. It is plausible that we should have had two locals as community contact people—we have done this in some EAGx conferences before. We will consider how we can communicate the roles of the organisers and contact people more effectively so others don’t feel that the role involves monitoring interactions.
Happy to talk more about any suggestions you have.
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 Jonathan,
I’m Catherine from CEA’s Community Health team. Thanks so much for sharing your experience, and I’m so sorry you felt uncomfortable.
A minor clarification: Each EAG or EAGx conference has a community contact person (or two). They are sometimes members of CEA’s community health team, but often they are either members of the local EA community or are members of CEA’s events team. It is not our intention for people to feel that they are being monitored.
I believe the person you are referring to is Ollie from CEA’s events team, whose role is to support the local organisers of EAGx events. He was walking around the venue to ensure the event was running smoothly and help out when needed.
Ollie was one of the two community contact people for EAGxSingapore, and a Singaporean organiser was the other contact person. This contact person role was a minor part of both of their roles that weekend. It is plausible that we should have had two locals as community contact people—we have done this in some EAGx conferences before. We will consider how we can communicate the roles of the organisers and contact people more effectively so others don’t feel that the role involves monitoring interactions.
Happy to talk more about any suggestions you have.
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.
I have a suggestion for you guys: be more transparent. Thanks.