EAGx conferences often feature meetups for subgroups with a shared interest / identity, such as “animal rights”, “academia” or “women”. Very easy to set up—yet some of the best events. Four forms I’ve seen are
a) speed-friending
b) brainstorming topics & discussing them in groups
c) red-teaming projects
d) just a big pile of people talking
If you want to maximize the amount of information transferred, form a) seems optimal purely because 50% of people are talking at any point in time in a personalized fashion. If you want to add some choice, you can start by letting people group themselves / order themselves on some spectrum. Presenting this as “human cluster-analysis” might also make it into a nerdy icebreaker. Works great with 7 minute rounds, at the end of which you’re only nudged, rather than required, to shift partners.
I loved form c) for AI safety projects at EAGx Berlin. Format: A few people introduce their projects to everyone, then grab a table and present them in more detail to smaller groups. This form might in general be used to allow interesting people to hold small low-effort interactive lectures & utilizing interested people as focus groups.
Form b) seems to be most common for interest-based meetups. It usually includes 1) group brainstorming of topics 2) voting on the topics 3) splitting up 4) presentations. This makes up for a good low-effort event that’s somewhere between a lecture and a 1-on-1 in terms of required energy. However, I see 4 common problems with this format: Firstly, steps 1) and 2) take a lot of time and create unnaturally clustered topics (as brainstorming creates topics “token-by-token”, rather than holistically). Secondly, in ad hoc groups with >5 members, it’s hard to coordinate who takes the word and in turn, conversations can turn into sequences of separate inputs, i.e. members build less upon themselves. Thirdly, spontaneous conversations are hard to compress into useful takeaways that can be presented on the whole group’s behalf.
Therefore, a better way of facilitating form b) may be:
Step 0 - before the event, come up with a natural way to divide the topic into a few clusters.
Step 1 - introduce these clusters, perhaps let attendees develop the sub-topics. Their number should divide the group into subgroups of 3-6 people.
Step 2 - every 15 minutes, offer attendees to change a group
Step 3 − 5 minutes before the end, prompt attendees to exchange contact info
Organizing good EAGx meetups
EAGx conferences often feature meetups for subgroups with a shared interest / identity, such as “animal rights”, “academia” or “women”. Very easy to set up—yet some of the best events. Four forms I’ve seen are
a) speed-friending
b) brainstorming topics & discussing them in groups
c) red-teaming projects
d) just a big pile of people talking
If you want to maximize the amount of information transferred, form a) seems optimal purely because 50% of people are talking at any point in time in a personalized fashion. If you want to add some choice, you can start by letting people group themselves / order themselves on some spectrum. Presenting this as “human cluster-analysis” might also make it into a nerdy icebreaker. Works great with 7 minute rounds, at the end of which you’re only nudged, rather than required, to shift partners.
I loved form c) for AI safety projects at EAGx Berlin. Format: A few people introduce their projects to everyone, then grab a table and present them in more detail to smaller groups. This form might in general be used to allow interesting people to hold small low-effort interactive lectures & utilizing interested people as focus groups.
Form b) seems to be most common for interest-based meetups. It usually includes 1) group brainstorming of topics 2) voting on the topics 3) splitting up 4) presentations. This makes up for a good low-effort event that’s somewhere between a lecture and a 1-on-1 in terms of required energy. However, I see 4 common problems with this format: Firstly, steps 1) and 2) take a lot of time and create unnaturally clustered topics (as brainstorming creates topics “token-by-token”, rather than holistically). Secondly, in ad hoc groups with >5 members, it’s hard to coordinate who takes the word and in turn, conversations can turn into sequences of separate inputs, i.e. members build less upon themselves. Thirdly, spontaneous conversations are hard to compress into useful takeaways that can be presented on the whole group’s behalf.
Therefore, a better way of facilitating form b) may be:
Step 0 - before the event, come up with a natural way to divide the topic into a few clusters.
Step 1 - introduce these clusters, perhaps let attendees develop the sub-topics. Their number should divide the group into subgroups of 3-6 people.
Step 2 - every 15 minutes, offer attendees to change a group
Step 3 − 5 minutes before the end, prompt attendees to exchange contact info
Step 4 - the end.
(I haven’t properly tried out this format yet.)