I’m the current Head of Business Operations at 80,000 Hours.
Before that I was the Interim Head of Operations at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), where I also was previously the lead organiser for EA Global. Before working at CEA I was an Operations Assistant at Open Philanthropy, and prior to that was involved in various community building projects at EA Oxford.
Thanks — these are some great questions, I’ll try to provide some more context on some of these below:
- We do currently have EAGxVirtual scheduled for November, though this is an EAGx rather than an EAG (and perhaps we should consider doing an EAG Virtual again). When we’ve looked at the stats, our virtual conferences do seem to get around half the connections per person. I also have the intuition that people are much less likely to make big career changes from virtual events (things like “I went to EAG London and it pushed me to drop out of my PhD”). But naturally given how cheap virtual events are, I agree we could be exploring these more.
- To discuss subsidies (somewhat mentioned here but also mentioned elsewhere and in the replies): I see there as being two main (connected) reasons here. One reason is that a lot of attendees are providing value to other people as well as than themselves, meaning that the value to them is maybe $500 but the total value of their attendance is maybe $1000 (made up numbers). This may be especially true for more senior members of the community who can provide a lot for others but perhaps have little to gain for themselves. The second reason is that a lot of our attendees don’t have that much disposable income — a lot of the people who can get the most value from advice and new connections are students, unemployed, or just generally not in a stable enough career path to be able to spend much money. But I’ll note that I generally agree that it would be better if more EAs paid for the services they used, hence why we’re planning to raise ticket prices (and are likely going to ask people who can afford it to pay for their ticket in its entirety).
- I’ll note that we are somewhat experimenting with other types of events on other parts of the events team, with things like EAGx’s in new regions and various retreats/smaller events (like the Summit on Existential Security) — and we continue to keep doing this in the future.
- We see the main route to impact for EAGs as (briefly): people forming new connections and having conversations that shift or accelerate them into higher-impact career paths. Though naturally this isn’t a super in-depth explanation, and perhaps we should share something more extensive in the future (I expect such a post to discuss a lot of concrete past examples of the above). I also feel like it could be a mistake to isolate the routes to impact down to just one or a few items, as part of me sees large events like this as somewhat nebulous, and likely to create impact in surprising or unexpected ways.
- And then to briefly touch on the venue closing thing — at least for the past two years we’ve closed our doors at ~10pm each day, largely because we need to move around furniture and set stuff up for the next day (as well as let staff sleep). Though I’d guess there’s some previous EAG or EAGx event pre-2022 that you’re referring to here that had earlier closing times (this may have been due to cost or staff capacity, not sure).
We’ve looked into this very briefly for EAG, and my understanding is that there aren’t many (large) venues for which this would work well. Most of our venues require us to spend a minimum amount of money on food and beverage, there often isn’t a clear location where food trucks would park, and most venues don’t let you bring in outside food into the venue (meaning that if it’s raining for example, attendees would have to eat their food truck lunches outside).
These aren’t slam down points, mostly because I’m not 100% confident how food trucks would work, and this has prompted me to investigate food trucks more deeply now, so thanks for that!
For EAG Bay Area 2023, we didn’t do dinners on the Saturday and Sunday night (to save money) and it worked well-ish because there were lots of restaurants nearby. I do think it meant that most attendees left at ~6pm and didn’t come back (whereas when we’ve provided dinner, lots of people stay until the 10pm closing time). This tells me that not providing dinner did come at some cost (reduced networking time), though I still think the decision to not provide these dinners was worth it given their potential financial cost.
Applications for EAG Boston are still open (here), and our early bird registration deadline is on August 4th! If you were accepted to EAG Bay Area or London this year, you can register directly within our portal and won’t need to apply again.
You can view our other events on our website, including EAGxNYC, EAGxBerlin, EAGxAustralia, and EAGxPhilippines.
If you have any questions, you can reach out to the team at hello@eaglobal.org.
Sorry for the delay, these talks are now live (here)!
Want to help CEA improve Swapcard? Swapcard is the networking and scheduling app currently used for EA Global and EAGx events, and their team are asking users for input on new features.
Two of these features are commonly requested by our attendees — calendar synchronization and automatically blocking your schedule if you RSVP for a session.
You can vote for these features to be added or give other feedback at the links below:
Entire Swapcard product roadmap: https://swapcard.notion.site/3ed5acc763e54ce2ad07e7563c0ee9c3?v=3f3b9d52f317449c828e4d4790dbf94d
Calendar synchronization: https://swapcard.notion.site/External-Calendar-Synchronization-a62d85808c45454ca620cdddfa46f791
Automatic schedule blocking: https://swapcard.notion.site/Handle-better-overlapping-of-the-meeting-time-slots-and-sessions-when-requesting-a-meeting-or-bookma-1771ae5e2e1348e981754a6f39913df5
I think it was implied by this statement but I think it’s a fair point that we could make this more explicit: “In interviews, don’t speak on behalf of the entire EA community, or anyone else in the EA community” (as if you were talking to an EA journalist, I think this wouldn’t really apply).
Hi Keller — appreciate the thoughts here! I wanted to quickly note that we did actually give attendees a heads up about this in our attendee guide, and we’ve done similarly in most of our other recent conference attendee guides.
Though I generally don’t expect attendees to read this all the way through, we did share it multiple times, and I’m not sure whether it would have made sense to email attendees about the journalist section specifically (if I was going to reiterate something, it probably wouldn’t be this).
Hi sorry for the slow reply, we’re currently not letting under 18s attend our events, sorry about that (you can see more detail in other comments below)!
This year we’re doing our East Coast EA Global in Boston, but we’re pretty open to shifting it back to DC in the future.
One type of event I’m provisionally excited about is a more introductory EA conference in DC targeted at mid-to-late career folks. Kinda like an EAGx but maybe more “professional” (everyone wears a suit and tie type of vibe). My sense from doing EA Global in DC was that there could be a fair amount of demand for something like this, but at this stage this is more of a vague idea than something I think we’re likely to organize any time soon.
Name badges should have preferred names yes — this is the first time we’re doing preferred names so if there are any technical issues you’ll be able to pick up a blank badge at the event itself and write whatever name you like on it.
Preferred names won’t go onto Swapcard by default but we’re looking into a way to make this happen (but anyone can change their own name on Swapcard if they like).
The previous recommendation for attendees to be double vaccinated was just written a while ago, and we hadn’t updated it until now.
Hi — I can confirm we did update the website now as a result of you posting this, so thanks for flagging this!
Okay weird, checking in on this now thanks for letting us know!
It doesn’t really add much cost, pricing for vegan vs non vegan items under standard large venue caterers is pretty similar.
I’ll note that many EA orgs already have whistleblower protection policies in place and that there are also various whistleblowing protection laws in many jurisdictions (including the US and the UK) which I assume any EA affiliated organization or employee would have to follow.
Hi thanks for flagging, we’re working on this and should have it fixed soon!
We’ve just posted one of these now, here — thanks again for the suggestion!
For extra context: the amount of logistical/legal work you need to do depends a lot between jurisdictions, and it’s a lot more work in the UK compared to the US for example.
We decided to introduce the age minimum recently because there’s a lot of logistical and legal work we‘d have to do to allow minors to attend in a way that’s by the book. We’ve only had interest from a handful of minors in the past, so decided this wasn’t worth the trade-off and that we should just not allow U18s to attend for now.
We recognize this is annoying and it wasn’t a decision we were happy about making. I hope one day we’ll have enough capacity to allow minors to attend.
It depends on the venue, but for EAG Boston for example the food and beverage minimum spend is $540k, and we’re planning to spend just a bit over this (we may go higher if more attendees end up registering).
I’m not sure how those academic conferences work — it’s possible that they take place in venues without in-house caterers or that they pay more up front to avoid a minimum spend. Because we usually get a minimum spend, attendees aren’t allowed to bring in their own food unless they have serious allergies (though of course people might still bring in their own food covertly).