Hi, thanks for writing this post, and sorry for the delay in responding! Jumpstarting more nuanced discussion about the broader EA ecosystem was one of our motivations for publishing the CEA dashboard, so personally I’m excited that you’ve found cool things to do with the data :)
1. You might be interested in the post I published recently on how different projects within the EA ecosystem are growing (I looked at 14 different orgs, not just CEA). It looks at year on year growth rates, so is less informative on the question of how programs did immediately before / after FTX, but might capture the broader q of, “how are ‘we’ doing right now?”. I think it could also help provide some of the data you’ve called for in this section.
2. FWIW, I wrote up a quick internal analysis that’s pretty similar to this post a couple of months ago, but never got around to publishing it. Not publishing that earlier was my fault, apologies — Various people (including Ben) had nudged me to do it, I just ended up being busy with other projects (e.g. the EA growth rates project). I now think that was a prioritization mistake and I should have pushed it out earlier. I think that original analysis is now mostly redundant with this post + the data from that post is pretty old, so I’m probably not going to prioritize publishing it now.
3. Some quick clarifications on some CEA data:
Prior to FTX, the subscriber base of the EA Newsletter had a long track record of steady growth. Since its collapse, the newsletter has been losing existing subscribers faster than it has been acquiring new ones.
There was a bug in my original data cleaning process, that led me to report slightly inaccurate EA newsletter subscriber data for the Aug-Sept 2023 period. The October release fixed this issue. It’s a pretty minor difference: e.g. I was reporting 58,136 subscribers in Sept instead of 58,742 (what it is now).
This basically doesn’t change the overall shape of the graph, but I think it’s more accurate to say that since mid 2023, the total number of subscribers has been at a standstill, as opposed to steadily declining.
Berlin is the only location that ran EAGX conferences both pre-and-post FTX. While Connections and Attendance both fell considerably post-FTX, the 2023 conference had a reduced budget and had to limit the conference size.
FWIW we now have the EAGxAustralia data up on the dashboard. On a cursory glance, it looks like # connections are pretty similar in 2022 v 2023 (1,941 in 2022, 2,134 in 2023). Same goes for # attendees (284 in 2022, 290 in 2023, although LTR is a bit lower (9.3 vs. 8.53).
Methodological note: No programs have data for December 2022. I’m not sure why that’s the case, or if FTX’s recent collapse influenced it in any way.
We didn’t start any virtual programs in December 2022 (although virtual programs are multiple months long, so there were virtual programs starting in earlier months that were ongoing at the time). So it’s not the case that we had data here and didn’t publish it!
Thanks Angelina! Your post is terrific, and I hope that you or someone else will update it in the future. It seems like a great starting point for the sort of regular analysis of community metrics I’ve called for. And I appreciate your clarification on some of the data points in my analysis.
Hi, thanks for writing this post, and sorry for the delay in responding! Jumpstarting more nuanced discussion about the broader EA ecosystem was one of our motivations for publishing the CEA dashboard, so personally I’m excited that you’ve found cool things to do with the data :)
1. You might be interested in the post I published recently on how different projects within the EA ecosystem are growing (I looked at 14 different orgs, not just CEA). It looks at year on year growth rates, so is less informative on the question of how programs did immediately before / after FTX, but might capture the broader q of, “how are ‘we’ doing right now?”. I think it could also help provide some of the data you’ve called for in this section.
2. FWIW, I wrote up a quick internal analysis that’s pretty similar to this post a couple of months ago, but never got around to publishing it. Not publishing that earlier was my fault, apologies — Various people (including Ben) had nudged me to do it, I just ended up being busy with other projects (e.g. the EA growth rates project). I now think that was a prioritization mistake and I should have pushed it out earlier. I think that original analysis is now mostly redundant with this post + the data from that post is pretty old, so I’m probably not going to prioritize publishing it now.
3. Some quick clarifications on some CEA data:
There was a bug in my original data cleaning process, that led me to report slightly inaccurate EA newsletter subscriber data for the Aug-Sept 2023 period. The October release fixed this issue. It’s a pretty minor difference: e.g. I was reporting 58,136 subscribers in Sept instead of 58,742 (what it is now).
This basically doesn’t change the overall shape of the graph, but I think it’s more accurate to say that since mid 2023, the total number of subscribers has been at a standstill, as opposed to steadily declining.
FWIW we now have the EAGxAustralia data up on the dashboard. On a cursory glance, it looks like # connections are pretty similar in 2022 v 2023 (1,941 in 2022, 2,134 in 2023). Same goes for # attendees (284 in 2022, 290 in 2023, although LTR is a bit lower (9.3 vs. 8.53).
We didn’t start any virtual programs in December 2022 (although virtual programs are multiple months long, so there were virtual programs starting in earlier months that were ongoing at the time). So it’s not the case that we had data here and didn’t publish it!
Thanks Angelina! Your post is terrific, and I hope that you or someone else will update it in the future. It seems like a great starting point for the sort of regular analysis of community metrics I’ve called for. And I appreciate your clarification on some of the data points in my analysis.