This is an open call for CEA to be more transparent with its finances and allocation of resources to different projects (historically and currently)
A quick google shows pretty inconsistent reporting metrics and update cadence over the past several years, as well as reporting gaps.
There is no easily available breakdown of funding / budgeting for most years
It seems like CEA staff do share numbers when asked ad-hoc—e.g. see this comment from JP Addison on spending of the Online team. But if someone wants to get a quick overview it would be incredibly time consuming to compute all the numbers
So it’s not that they are entirely transparent, but that they aren’t making this information easy to access, which feels bad / like obfuscation. And I think they are succeeding—I don’t think many people do have the time or inclination to sift through data.
As a key entity in the EA ecosystem (even if the scope changes), it seems good to demonstrate high transparency and data accessibility even if the decisions are not endorsed by the average community member.
Spicier take: I think they aren’t sharing it, in large part, because of optics. This feels like a bad reason not to be transparent. For example, I think right now, given FTX and less funding, the Events team in particular is hesitant to share how much they put into EAG(x)’s in 2022. Their update on spending post didn’t mention specific numbers. My understanding is that most people who requested it were given full travel & lodging subsidies (maybe up to $1500 per person, for thousands of individuals). This could be several million in funding in 2022 alone.
Ollie here from the CEA events team, thanks for this nudge. We’re planning on sharing an update w.r.t to our costs here later this year. You can also see my recent sequence about the costs of EAGx and how we prioritise among events (this doesn’t cover EA Global though).
Tickets are often around 10-20% of the cost to host each person (our funders are covering the rest).
Assuming $100 per ticket and 600 attendees it would be $300,000 - $600,000 per EAG(x), possibly excluding travel & lodging subsidies.
But I do not understand why you think these numbers are important. What actions would you do differently if the cost was $60,000 per event or $10,000,000 per event?
This is an open call for CEA to be more transparent with its finances and allocation of resources to different projects (historically and currently)
A quick google shows pretty inconsistent reporting metrics and update cadence over the past several years, as well as reporting gaps.
There is no easily available breakdown of funding / budgeting for most years
It seems like CEA staff do share numbers when asked ad-hoc—e.g. see this comment from JP Addison on spending of the Online team. But if someone wants to get a quick overview it would be incredibly time consuming to compute all the numbers
So it’s not that they are entirely transparent, but that they aren’t making this information easy to access, which feels bad / like obfuscation. And I think they are succeeding—I don’t think many people do have the time or inclination to sift through data.
As a key entity in the EA ecosystem (even if the scope changes), it seems good to demonstrate high transparency and data accessibility even if the decisions are not endorsed by the average community member.
Spicier take: I think they aren’t sharing it, in large part, because of optics. This feels like a bad reason not to be transparent. For example, I think right now, given FTX and less funding, the Events team in particular is hesitant to share how much they put into EAG(x)’s in 2022. Their update on spending post didn’t mention specific numbers. My understanding is that most people who requested it were given full travel & lodging subsidies (maybe up to $1500 per person, for thousands of individuals). This could be several million in funding in 2022 alone.
Ollie here from the CEA events team, thanks for this nudge. We’re planning on sharing an update w.r.t to our costs here later this year. You can also see my recent sequence about the costs of EAGx and how we prioritise among events (this doesn’t cover EA Global though).
To follow up here, Eli recently published this post outlining recent costs and what we plan on doing to bring them down.
I was excited to see this post—appreciate the events team sharing this.
https://twitter.com/Ollie_Base/status/1695084951807349095
Assuming $100 per ticket and 600 attendees it would be $300,000 - $600,000 per EAG(x), possibly excluding travel & lodging subsidies.
But I do not understand why you think these numbers are important. What actions would you do differently if the cost was $60,000 per event or $10,000,000 per event?
ETA: I was very wrong: EAGx events do typically cost $150–500k, but the CEA-run EAGs cost $2-3M
Thanks for copying this across!
Yep, your estimate was right for EAGxNYC (~$500k) but that was much cheaper than EA Global.