Academic background: BE(Hons) ChemE, BSc Physics, Chemistry.
Career background:
Research science, engineering, product development, project management, quality systems.
EA community buillding across NZ and Australia (EAIF Grant ’21-’22), and co-founded the EA Auckland University group in 2015.
Hobbies: Perfumery, bouldering/climbing, fire-dancing, chess and strategy board games
Professional generalist / event specialist
Mine weirdly only shows on my mobile and not on my PC. Something to do with it being on a different calendar. Maybe that’s what’s happening for you?
Ah interesting, good to know! What kind of bugs have you encountered? I did some basic tests and it seemed to work smoothly for me.
Long-awaited Swapcard feature releases!
The moment we have all been waiting for (and that I’ve been pushing on for coming up to two years) is finally here!
You can now:
Note: Calendar syncing needs to be enabled on the Web version of Swapcard.
Thanks for writing this! Well written :)
I recently attended my third course and I echo the idea that Vipassana has made me a better activist (as well partner, friend, son, colleague, etc).
I like your recommendation to implement this at an organizational level. While it might not be practical for all orgs, I think it’s a neat idea to incentivize attendance (with the understanding that Vipassana might not be for everyone — though neither is a Project Management online course).
I also think the EA community is overrepresented on having attended at least one Vipassana course, compared to the general population; but that’s just a guess/speculation.
Hey Molly,
Thanks for the post!
Definitely agree that it would be valuable to explicate our models of the world, especially numerically!
Heads up that you have a repeat paragraph immediately after the probability graph for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“When we’re estimating the risk of an extinction-causing asteroid impact...”
For now, the standard 12 signs is the easiest to implement. However, we will follow up with an Ophiuchus update in due course!
The implementation of Feng-Shui for venue spaces was considered to be out of budget; though this is something we will be keeping in mind for future conferences. We are still evaluating Numerology for effectiveness, though preliminary results suggest that the recursive reduction sum of your birth-date may be predictive of compatibility with others e.g. 11/11/1999 DD/MM/YYYY = 5+9+9+9 = 32 (3+2) = 5. Numbers closer to you (imagine 1–9 in a circle) may be more likely to be compatible.
It’s been a long haul, but we’ve finally convinced their CEO (a Pisces), that redeveloping their core architecture to support star-sign matching would be a good business decision.
While our star signs may be relevant for optimizing 1-1 matches (sorry, we’re not compatible), we don’t have evidence to suggest there’s any influence of star signs on the ability to evaluate the use of star signs to optimize 1-1 matches. We therefore recommend against using the lack of knowledge of our star signs as a reason to not believe our claims.
Do you think it was better?
Hi Caleb,
Ivan from the EAG team here — I’m responsible for a bunch of the systems we use at our events (including Swapcard).
Thanks for flagging this! It’s useful to hear that this could do with more clarity. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way we can add help text or sub text to the Swapcard fields due to Swapcard limitations. However, we could rename the labels/field names to make this clearer..?
For example
Areas of Expertise (3+ months work experience)
Areas of Interest (actively seeking to learn more)
Does that sound like something that would be helpful for you to know what to put down? I’ll take this to the EAG team and see if we can come up with something better. Let me know if you have other suggestions!
This piqued my curiosity, so I looked into it — it seems that there’s a pretty equal split between pre-conference meetings scheduled (2449) and during-conference meetings scheduled (2039), with meeting confirmation frequency peaking on the Friday of the event. This is just EA Global: Boston 2023 data and I haven’t looked at the others — but it does indicate to me that we don’t want to set up systems that favour one type of user and disadvantaging another.
Yeah this is a big one, and I have actually been pushing for this feature since January. Unfortunately, Swapcard don’t see this as important enough to prioritize it. The last I heard, this was added to the Q3 roadmap, but knowing the timelines I don’t expect this to be done any time soon (though I am following up about it!).
Good luck! I’d be keen to hear how it goes for you!
I guess I can see it being intentionally used a mechanism to prevent people from fabricating votes, but given the difficulty of doing that relative to Swapcard’s popularity as a service — this level of resistance seems unnecessary.
Wish Swapcard was better?
Swapcard, the networking and scheduling app for EA Global and EAGx events, has published their product roadmap — where anyone can vote on features they want to see!
Two features currently in the “Researching (Vote)” stage have been requested by our attendees since the beginning of us using Swapcard for our events:
1) Reschedule a meeting
2) External Calendar Synchronization
If these sound like features you want, I encourage you to take a moment to vote for them! Every vote counts.
Swapcard product roadmap
I don’t know how any of this works, but is it a possibility for you to tell the Tech Transfer office that you will let them file the patent conditionally on it being free-license/non-limiting, otherwise you will publish it open-source? In line with TeddyW’s response — it sounds like licensing with “altruistic clauses” is something that the Tech Transfer office would be opposed to, given that they are for-profit; but maybe you have some leverage because presumably they have some incentive to file for the patent rather than it being fully open-source..?
Hi Quinn,
I’m Ivan and I’m responsible for the systems-side of things on the CEA Events team.
I understand and share your frustration about the confusing User Interface of Swapcard’s “Update your details?” modal. This has been confusing for multiple users in the past, and is something I’ve been pushing Swapcard to improve for a while now (I even sent them an email with a screenshot of the modal we use to do this on the EA Forum — which is magnitudes better)...
If you are referring to data completed via the registration form, I can have this data re-pushed to Swapcard for you so that you don’t have to re-type it (note that you’ll need to select the “Accept new data” option for this to work). The reason this whole thing exists is because of GDPR and so we can’t technically edit user profile data without their consent.
If you encountered the modal after filling out your profile on Swapcard, then please let me know — as this would indicate that the modal is showing at the wrong time, and I can follow up with Swapcard about this.
Hope this helps!
Thanks, updated!
Appreciate the feedback here. Just to add on to what Robert said in the other comment:
You’re right that a successful referral is worth much more than a sticker or pin! When we were designing the program, we did consider more substantial rewards. But we also wanted to be careful not to incentivize gaming the system (which gets trickier the more valuable the reward), and make sure the program stayed focused on community-building rather than making it transactional.
That said, I’ve also noticed that people genuinely enjoy the small, fun merch/swag at EAG/x events—stickers, shirts, hoodies with EA-y designs, etc. And because the referral rewards will be unique, they might act as conversation starters or visible signals that quietly prompt others to refer as well.
It’s also worth noting, as mentioned in the post, that many people were already referring friends informally—this program just offers a small way to recognize and appreciate that effort! We’re hoping it serves more as a light prompt or nudge than a financial incentive.
Really appreciate you raising this, though—it’s helpful feedback, and we’ll keep it in mind as we move forward.