To add my 2 cents: For me as a father of two children the cost of spending a whole weekend working is a huge and potentially prohibitive cost and one of the reasons I didn’t attend EAG London this year (for me much more relevant than 200US$ more or less).
So I’m wondering why you have decided not to do EAGs during the week? My assumption is that especially more senior people would be more willing to come. Maybe even if that would include travel (to a cheaper location).
Thanks for sharing this Sebastian! We haven’t explicitly asked people whether weekends work better than weekdays, though this has now come up a couple of times such that I’d like to do so in the future.
But my expectation is that weekends would work much better for most of our attendees as few of them have children (even the more senior folks). A lot of our attendees are students who might have classes during the week and many others work jobs for which they can’t easily take time off for our event (jobs in government or academia for example).
We haven’t explicitly asked people whether weekends work better than weekdays
I ran a Twitter poll (n = 297), and the results were fairly decisive in favour of weekends:
14.5% would be more likely to go to EAG if it was during the week
65% would be more likely to go on a weekend
20.5% were indifferent.
Obviously not a representative sample or a carefully crafted survey, and it’s possible people are anchored on weekends because that’s when EAGs have historically taken place, but that’s quite a large margin.
Still, it sucks that this doesn’t work for everyone!
I get why EAGs are not optimized for parents (still unfortunate in my case). What surprises me even more though is that at least my reading of your comment suggests that for most EAG attendees EA is still a side hustle (otherwise it would be part of their jobs or studies to attend an EA conference).
I don’t think it’s quite that it’s a side hustle for them — it’s mostly just that it’s only a minority of attendees are working for EA orgs that are likely to be okay with them taking time off for an EA conference. If you’re a biology student planning on working in biosecurity in the future, my guess is that you won’t easily be able to move or skip your classes. Similar things might apply for people working in government or people who are skilling up outside of EA (e.g. as a law clerk).
many others work jobs for which they can’t easily take time off for our event
Potential counter-argument(s): - some EA organisations count this as work-time anyway, so it might not matter; - in general, some organisations have a self-development time-budget where people are allowed/supposed to take up to X days a year for conferences and workshops (usually 5, I think), so might be worth looking into;
I want to quickly note that we often don’t have that many options for what dates we can get. Large venues are often booked out well in advance, and sometimes you need to take what you can get. It’s also pretty likely that you’re gonna clash with something, such as a particular university’s final exams. I also doubt expect that having it on Passover/Easter affected attendance that much.
I’ll note that I don’t think the above is a great excuse — I still think it was suboptimal to host an event then, but it can be quite tricky to get everything right here!
Strongly agree. Of course it’s different what works for different people but I think it’s a little odd that both EAG and EAGx seem to always be over the weekend, and I would be curious to see how the composition of attendees would shift if an event was held on work days.
To add my 2 cents: For me as a father of two children the cost of spending a whole weekend working is a huge and potentially prohibitive cost and one of the reasons I didn’t attend EAG London this year (for me much more relevant than 200US$ more or less).
So I’m wondering why you have decided not to do EAGs during the week? My assumption is that especially more senior people would be more willing to come. Maybe even if that would include travel (to a cheaper location).
Thanks for sharing this Sebastian! We haven’t explicitly asked people whether weekends work better than weekdays, though this has now come up a couple of times such that I’d like to do so in the future.
But my expectation is that weekends would work much better for most of our attendees as few of them have children (even the more senior folks). A lot of our attendees are students who might have classes during the week and many others work jobs for which they can’t easily take time off for our event (jobs in government or academia for example).
I ran a Twitter poll (n = 297), and the results were fairly decisive in favour of weekends:
14.5% would be more likely to go to EAG if it was during the week
65% would be more likely to go on a weekend
20.5% were indifferent.
Obviously not a representative sample or a carefully crafted survey, and it’s possible people are anchored on weekends because that’s when EAGs have historically taken place, but that’s quite a large margin.
Still, it sucks that this doesn’t work for everyone!
Thanks for the reply.
I get why EAGs are not optimized for parents (still unfortunate in my case). What surprises me even more though is that at least my reading of your comment suggests that for most EAG attendees EA is still a side hustle (otherwise it would be part of their jobs or studies to attend an EA conference).
I don’t think it’s quite that it’s a side hustle for them — it’s mostly just that it’s only a minority of attendees are working for EA orgs that are likely to be okay with them taking time off for an EA conference. If you’re a biology student planning on working in biosecurity in the future, my guess is that you won’t easily be able to move or skip your classes. Similar things might apply for people working in government or people who are skilling up outside of EA (e.g. as a law clerk).
Potential counter-argument(s):
- some EA organisations count this as work-time anyway, so it might not matter;
- in general, some organisations have a self-development time-budget where people are allowed/supposed to take up to X days a year for conferences and workshops (usually 5, I think), so might be worth looking into;
Especially as I seem to recall EAG was put on Easter/Passover weekend one year.
I want to quickly note that we often don’t have that many options for what dates we can get. Large venues are often booked out well in advance, and sometimes you need to take what you can get. It’s also pretty likely that you’re gonna clash with something, such as a particular university’s final exams. I also doubt expect that having it on Passover/Easter affected attendance that much.
I’ll note that I don’t think the above is a great excuse — I still think it was suboptimal to host an event then, but it can be quite tricky to get everything right here!
Strongly agree. Of course it’s different what works for different people but I think it’s a little odd that both EAG and EAGx seem to always be over the weekend, and I would be curious to see how the composition of attendees would shift if an event was held on work days.