The organising team (CEA) were opinionated about which issues to focus on, and we chose issues that we and MCF attendees could make progress on.
Our content was centered around just two issues (brand and funding) which allowed for focus and more substantive progress.
Many attendees expressed a similar sentiment, and some people who’ve attended this event many times said this was one of the best iterations. With that context, I’ll respond to each point:
We wanted to focus on issues that were upstream of important object-level work in EA, and selected people working on those issues, rather than object-level work (though we had some attendees who were doing object-level work). I agree with you that a lot of (if not all!) the impact of the community is coming from people working at the object level, but this impact is directly affected by upstream issues such as the EA brand and funding diversity. Note that many other events we run, such as EA Global and the Summit on Existential Security, are more focused on object-level issues.
To the contrary, I think we made valuable progress, though this is fairly subjective and a bit hard to defend until more projects and initiatives play out. I’m not sure what the distinction is you’re pointing to here; you mention we should’ve considered “[EA]’s strategy with outreach and funding”, but these were the two core themes of the event.
This was a deliberate call, though we’re not confident it was the right one. CEA staff and our attendees spend a lot of time engaging with the community and getting input on what we should prioritise. We probably didn’t capture everything, but that context gives us a good grasp of which issues to work on.
I don’t think every event, project and meeting in EA spaces needs to be this stringent about measuring outcomes. We use similar metrics across all of our events, things like LTR/NPS are used in many other industries, so I think these are useful benchmarks for understanding how valuable attendees found the event.
(I helped organise this event)
Thanks for your feedback.
Actually, I think this event went well because:
The organising team (CEA) were opinionated about which issues to focus on, and we chose issues that we and MCF attendees could make progress on.
Our content was centered around just two issues (brand and funding) which allowed for focus and more substantive progress.
Many attendees expressed a similar sentiment, and some people who’ve attended this event many times said this was one of the best iterations. With that context, I’ll respond to each point:
We wanted to focus on issues that were upstream of important object-level work in EA, and selected people working on those issues, rather than object-level work (though we had some attendees who were doing object-level work). I agree with you that a lot of (if not all!) the impact of the community is coming from people working at the object level, but this impact is directly affected by upstream issues such as the EA brand and funding diversity. Note that many other events we run, such as EA Global and the Summit on Existential Security, are more focused on object-level issues.
To the contrary, I think we made valuable progress, though this is fairly subjective and a bit hard to defend until more projects and initiatives play out. I’m not sure what the distinction is you’re pointing to here; you mention we should’ve considered “[EA]’s strategy with outreach and funding”, but these were the two core themes of the event.
This was a deliberate call, though we’re not confident it was the right one. CEA staff and our attendees spend a lot of time engaging with the community and getting input on what we should prioritise. We probably didn’t capture everything, but that context gives us a good grasp of which issues to work on.
I don’t think every event, project and meeting in EA spaces needs to be this stringent about measuring outcomes. We use similar metrics across all of our events, things like LTR/NPS are used in many other industries, so I think these are useful benchmarks for understanding how valuable attendees found the event.