This is a reasonable question to ask, but it felt a bit unkind so I downvoted. I think it’s okay to post things that are clearly framed as “here’s the vibe of our community” and not “here’s why we’re impactful” and I wish you’d at least acknowledged that was the aim of the post before requesting more info.
OllieBase
Karma: 3,472
Thanks for doing all you do! You’re always very responsive, very helpful and track lots of things so that staff like me (CEA) don’t have to.
^ This should make you think that whatever Phoebe says here is probably decent advice for ops roles!
I’m guessing Rockwell meant “fringe”
legitimize “fridge” causes
He also has cold takes, presumably
The slide Nathan is referring to. “We didn’t listen” feels a little strong; lots of people were working on policy detail or calling for it, it just seems ex post like it didn’t get sufficient attention. I agree directionally though, and Richard’s guesses at the causes (expecting fast take-off + business-as-usual politics) seem reasonable to me.
Also, *EAGxBerlin.
Very excited for this event!
The CEA community health team does serve as a mediation function sometimes, I think. Maybe that’s not enough, but it seems worth mentioning.
Yes, EAGxNYC was definitely higher production value than EAGxCambridge and many others. It probably was ~EAG-level production value. The venue was surprisingly cheap for such a central location, given the amenities.
Thanks for sharing this. I’ve not been following your work closely, but running a new org with very ambitious goals must be challenging, and I appreciate you acknowledging and sharing your mistakes so far. It would be surprising if you hadn’t made a few mistakes at this point. Good luck!
To follow up here, Eli recently published this post outlining recent costs and what we plan on doing to bring them down.
Thanks for copying this across!
Yep, your estimate was right for EAGxNYC (~$500k) but that was much cheaper than EA Global.
We haven’t explicitly asked people whether weekends work better than weekdays
I ran a Twitter poll (n = 297), and the results were fairly decisive in favour of weekends:
14.5% would be more likely to go to EAG if it was during the week
65% would be more likely to go on a weekend
20.5% were indifferent.
Obviously not a representative sample or a carefully crafted survey, and it’s possible people are anchored on weekends because that’s when EAGs have historically taken place, but that’s quite a large margin.
Still, it sucks that this doesn’t work for everyone!
Thanks for this comment, all seems basically right (I run the EAGx programme).
different groups could try different strategies and we could see what works best (e.g. minimize printing, have the many bored idle volunteers record talks with their phones instead of paying thousands per recorded talk, …)
Yes, we do exactly this (EAGxNYC recorded talks on phones, in fact). We’ve even had a few instances where an EAGx team tried something, it worked really well and then EAG incorporated it. One example is that EAGxBerlin 2022 put up posters with contact information for the community health support team, which attendees appreciated and which EAG copied.
Firstly, I agree with Daniel that we should just do both. Smaller events like the one you’re suggesting here are worth doing (and I expect local EA groups do exactly this)
But I think there are effects that kick in only when events reach a certain size, e.g.Speakers/experts will travel if they can speak to hundreds of people, but not to a room.
Similarly, if travel is costly for attendees, they might only make the trip for one large event, but not for a small event.
If you’re looking for new opportunities, you want to speak to a wide range of people, and you might not get that with a small event.
FWIW, we have funded lots of small retreats and compared their cost-effectiveness with EAGx events, the post about that is here. The retreats were much more expensive than the pub idea, but we found that they produced a similar amount of value per person despite being almost twice the cost per person. EAG is even more expensive per person, but has the effects described above.
I say this at EAGx events and in various posts, but I still don’t think I say it enough: running EAGx events is a huge amount of work, and most of this work is done by dedicated and hard-working EA community members and national group staff. My colleagues and I support these teams, but I think we get too much credit.
I’m continuously impressed by EAGx teams; their thoughtfulness, their focus on impact and the sheer amount of effort they put into ensuring these events go well (and they do). There’s not been a team I haven’t enjoyed working with.
I think there’s more I could do to make working on EAGx events more enjoyable/efficient/worthwhile, but at the very least I want to be extremely open about my (and CEA’s) gratitude towards these people for all they do, have done and will do.
Applications to EAGxBerlin, EAGxAustralia and EAGxPhilippines are open, and Berlin closes tonight. (Adding this because these teams would probably rather I promote their events than just thank them)
Some good advice here, but I don’t think it applies universally. I like forum posts that use (correct) technical language when it conveys important information, and I think some of the best forum posts are dense and carefully-argued. I think some amount of jargon is okay too, though probably worth trying to avoid.
Ollie here from the CEA events team, thanks for this nudge. We’re planning on sharing an update w.r.t to our costs here later this year. You can also see my recent sequence about the costs of EAGx and how we prioritise among events (this doesn’t cover EA Global though).
Never thought I’d see the day of an EA / Aunty Donna crossover, but here we are. Thank you.
That’s fair. I agree accomplishments probably wasn’t the right word for this kind of post.