Thanks to everyone who helps make these events possible. I assume UC Berkeley in the summer that accommodated ~1000 people in 2016 was not more expensive, so you would describe it as less suited to the event? Why is that? It had the large advantage of very inexpensive housing in the dorms. That is understandable if CEA only wants to subsidize a certain number of tickets, but I would think there are significant number of additional people who would pay the full cost. I’m interested in the estimate of the percent reduction in value to the first ~600 participants associated with a larger conference and how that was weighed against the value that additional participants could get. With fewer EAGx events, I expect the value of the latter would be larger this year than other years.
Hi David, one thing to note is that, since EA Global SF 2020 is in March, the dorms are unlikely to be available. Apart from that: you are correct that there are several ways in which the venue is less suited, e.g. because it is spread across three separate buildings, it’s worse for sparking “serendipitous” interactions between attendees, and the distribution of room sizes is a worse fit. (The venue we selected for EA Global SF 2020 [Bespoke] is very configurable, so it’s easier for us to have one big room for the opening talk, then split it into a bunch of small rooms for meet ups, etc.)
Regarding scaling the event: it’s hard for us to precisely estimate the cost of more attendees. One hypothesis we have is that improved matchmaking (either through formal matchmaking programs or through event apps which let attendees connect with each other) will let us increase the number of attendees at EA Global while preventing the “lost in the shuffle” feeling mentioned above. We have piloted several programs like this last year and will continue iterating and scaling them this year to see if that hypothesis is correct.
Are there any plans to split EAG into “conference” vs “meetup”? I know a lot of people don’t go to the programming at all and just go to have meetings and meet people. Which is totally fine but if CEA is going to the trouble of planning a conference, it would be interesting to see how many people actually go to the conference programming (aside from opening and closing talks). Reduced priced tickets could be for meetups only and higher prices for those going to the talks in a separate area of the venue.
I’ve seen professional conferences publish the agenda once tickets are available and attendees indicate which sessions they’ll go to. This helps with space/room configurations, not sure if it would be helpful for EAG or not since agendas seem to be released closer to the event date. I’ve also seen conferences that have “room counters” who take note of how many people were in each session to gauge attendee behavior for future events. Again, not sure if that’s helpful or something you already do.
We don’t have any current plans to split EA Global into multiple sub-conferences. We have used the fact that not everyone attends talks to increase attendance (for example, at EA Global London 2019, we accepted more attendees than could fit in the venue for the opening talk on the assumption that not all of them would attend the opening).
We will keep the sub-conference idea in mind for the future.
Thanks to everyone who helps make these events possible. I assume UC Berkeley in the summer that accommodated ~1000 people in 2016 was not more expensive, so you would describe it as less suited to the event? Why is that? It had the large advantage of very inexpensive housing in the dorms. That is understandable if CEA only wants to subsidize a certain number of tickets, but I would think there are significant number of additional people who would pay the full cost. I’m interested in the estimate of the percent reduction in value to the first ~600 participants associated with a larger conference and how that was weighed against the value that additional participants could get. With fewer EAGx events, I expect the value of the latter would be larger this year than other years.
Hi David, one thing to note is that, since EA Global SF 2020 is in March, the dorms are unlikely to be available. Apart from that: you are correct that there are several ways in which the venue is less suited, e.g. because it is spread across three separate buildings, it’s worse for sparking “serendipitous” interactions between attendees, and the distribution of room sizes is a worse fit. (The venue we selected for EA Global SF 2020 [Bespoke] is very configurable, so it’s easier for us to have one big room for the opening talk, then split it into a bunch of small rooms for meet ups, etc.)
Regarding scaling the event: it’s hard for us to precisely estimate the cost of more attendees. One hypothesis we have is that improved matchmaking (either through formal matchmaking programs or through event apps which let attendees connect with each other) will let us increase the number of attendees at EA Global while preventing the “lost in the shuffle” feeling mentioned above. We have piloted several programs like this last year and will continue iterating and scaling them this year to see if that hypothesis is correct.
Are there any plans to split EAG into “conference” vs “meetup”? I know a lot of people don’t go to the programming at all and just go to have meetings and meet people. Which is totally fine but if CEA is going to the trouble of planning a conference, it would be interesting to see how many people actually go to the conference programming (aside from opening and closing talks). Reduced priced tickets could be for meetups only and higher prices for those going to the talks in a separate area of the venue.
I’ve seen professional conferences publish the agenda once tickets are available and attendees indicate which sessions they’ll go to. This helps with space/room configurations, not sure if it would be helpful for EAG or not since agendas seem to be released closer to the event date. I’ve also seen conferences that have “room counters” who take note of how many people were in each session to gauge attendee behavior for future events. Again, not sure if that’s helpful or something you already do.
We don’t have any current plans to split EA Global into multiple sub-conferences. We have used the fact that not everyone attends talks to increase attendance (for example, at EA Global London 2019, we accepted more attendees than could fit in the venue for the opening talk on the assumption that not all of them would attend the opening).
We will keep the sub-conference idea in mind for the future.