I’ve just started working at 80,000 Hours (November 2024) in preparation to take on the Head of Business Operations role there in early 2025.
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 — and yep we’re aware of them! We haven’t gained much from their information previously though perhaps could be digging deeper here.
Also, one other thing we’re thinking about here is trying to memorialize content in other (cheaper) ways, like having the talks written up as Forum posts.
Thanks for your thoughts here!
It is true that we haven’t advertised our content much and could possibly get more views if we did. We are planning to do more here, but we estimated that we’d have to really get a lot more views for it to be worth it (recording each stage costs ~$50k) and we expect we won’t succeed in getting the videos that much exposure.
And we considered your second (and third to some extent) points when making a decision here but still concluded we should cut back at this time.
Re the printing and signage — I’ll note that EAG London was something of an outlier here because the venue we used is a Grade I listed building (i.e. a building designated of architectural/historical interest and hence worthy of protection). This meant that we couldn’t stick anything on any of the walls and so we had to spend more money on other types of free-standing signage.
Yep — this is basically my preferred option right now for what we should do (transparent options/honor-code basis).
No problem, thanks for your thoughts here! I’ll note that in venues where we have a minimum spend, attendees aren’t allowed to bring outside food into the venue unless they have serious allergies. So if we did hand out Soylent/snacks somewhere else, they’d have to consume this on the street or something (which may be a disaster if it’s raining or cold).
Re reserving nearby restaurants — we did this at EAG Bay Area and plan to do it again in the future (we just reserved some restaurant tables but had attendees pay for their own meals). If we were to actually plan meals/do catering at multiple nearby restaurants, that would likely be a lot of work on our end and we probably wouldn’t have capacity to pull it off well.
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).
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)!
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).