Help CEA plan future events and conferences

EAGs can turn into a long weekend of 1on1s for some people.

I think this is probably happening more to senior EAs.

See actual message:

Thoughts:

• I guess that senior EAs (gatekeepers) tend to be more locked up in 1on1s. People not in these 1on1s—everyone else in the conference—is in a different pool of "leftovers". Maybe the "leftovers" are missing both senior people as well as ambitious, junior people. This (completely innocent) process might lead to some sort of "adverse selection"/"attractor state" story, as more people realize that the pool of people has changed.  As a result, “speed meetings” might not fix things.
• It’s common to advise a new EA to prioritize meeting people over going to events (sometimes the senior people also mention that they don't attend events at all). This raises issues: if this advice is so dominant, we should signpost it for everyone—but then we need clarity about what the scheduled events are supposed to be.
• A valid perspective is that a 1on1 fest is optimal. But if this is true, maybe we can lean into it and set up another format of conference?

You could write a lot about this, but a weekend of 30 minute 1on1s has different value than a  meetup. I think the openness, flexibility and dense concentration of people in a conference creates valuable interactions.

Overall, I’m not sure this is a defect, but there is probably something going on related to scaling. There is an opportunity to make things work better.

If you believed thought some of the above was happening and you wanted to edit EAG to address it, it would require care and moderate actions. Maybe we could nudge people into open events, or develop 1:2 or 1:3 formats.

This takes some coordination, so for next steps, we probably want to hear from others.

On my wishlist is more nooks with couches for small groups to have a quiet chat

First, I'm really thankful for EAG events and for the responsible teams.

I think the main difference of opinion I have around EA Global is around the fact that they seem to really put forward an optimistic and unified picture of things. The opening/closing presentations and introductions to presenters all have really positive and deferential spins.

They feel a bit (to me) like they're sending the message:

"Things are going great in EA right now. We've sort of figured out how the world works, and we know what to do about it. All of these speakers have super esteemed backgrounds and deserve to be listened to. Each one is really smart and is making a great point."

I think this is basically the same message as other popular conferences in other disciplines. And there are a lot of nice things about this sort of positivity.

In comparison, to me, my picture is more like,

"We've barely done some incremental steps, and we're very likely to be highly mistaken about some crucial steps, we just can't figure out which ones. We have a bunch of people who seem pretty good, but it's really hard to tell. It's not clear at all how many of the world's problems we could actually conquer, or if things are really hopeless. We need to try out best, but be really humble, and we should constantly be questioning ourselves."

I imagine this would be a far worse sales pitch for new EAs.

It's quite possible that a very positive picture is good for the larger events, with more newcomers, but that we'd want more of the "angrier, debate-friendly" structures for either more strategic/senior people, or for select smaller groups.

For some reason, I just saw this post. Hopefully it's still being monitored. I've shared some of this feedback in the past but thought it was worth sharing here:

• More small group (3-5 person) discussions and workshops - especially cause / affiliation / career meetups. Those are mostly 1-1 networking, which is useful, but I'd rather meet the same people in 3 small 20 min group discussions than in 5 or 7-minute 1-1s. 
  • Especially for affiliation groups
  • I think this will give more of a sense of community than 1-1s alone can do.
  • It's also easier to coordinate a 1-1 after a conference than a multi-person meeting, and you lose a lot more with >2 people virtually (e.g. due to lags and time zones being complicated etc.)
  • Maybe find an event app that could schedule >2 person meetings 
• Make it easier for participants to spontaneously meet-up
  • E.g. "I want to discuss the recent Forum post discussing XYZ at lunch on Sunday, join me at 1pm if you're interested!"
• More emphasis on office hours over talks: I think everyone agrees that talks are not the most valuable part of EAG (they are probably more useful at EAGx's). I'd happily have 50% less talks to have more office hours or workshops from EA speakers. 
  • You could promote recent work by those speakers online / on the Forum before the conference for interested people
• Consistently open the conference app at least 2 weeks / 10 days before the event (something fixed that people can expect) and publicize this clearly on the website / slacks / email / etc. 
  • I would say even releasing the agenda >= 3 weeks before the conference so that people can read up on the speakers and take time to choose what events they want to go to. I understand that speakers sometimes change their plans, but it seems fine to me to update the schedule. 
  • Especially for new people, it can be useful to see even a rough agenda to get a sense of what kinds of events there are 
• Post the full agenda and talks of every past EAG on eaglobal.org website. I sometimes want to share "that talk Neil Buddy Shah gave at EAG SF 2019" and then spend 10 minutes googling it. 
   
• (Also I love the illustration!)
  
  
   

A Careers Fair

Not just lots of orgs inviting people to come work for them but lots of workshops.