Thoughts on (re)naming EA conferences

By Kaleem @ 2022-06-09T15:46 (+51)

TLDR: We should revise our events naming strategy because the way we do it now does not adequately convey important info.

This is a short post expressing an opinion I hold having organised EAGxBoston, attended CEA's events retreat, and continue on providing advice to other EAGx organisers.

EAG vs EAGx:

It is worth having a discussion or getting some clarification about what the “x” in EAGx stands for.

In the past, it seems like the community has typically considered EAGxs to be an event which is smaller in scale, less professionally organized, and aimed at a different audience compared to EAGs (maybe EAGs are for highly engaged and/or experienced members of the community, whereas EAGxs are for those who are newer to EA, like people who had just completed an intro fellowship). ^[1]

However a different interpretation of the distinction between the two might be seen similarly to the distinction between TED and TEDx events, where the “x” just denotes that the event is independently organized by people not employed by TED.

It is worth sorting this out because if we plan on having a lot more EA conferences and events in the coming years, we should make it clear to potential organizers and attendees what their options are.

Experience Level

If the “x” is to denote non-CEA organized events, then we should create a signal for the level of engagement of the event (if that should continue to be a thing) – maybe EAGxSummit for highly engaged/experienced members, and EAGxConference for newer members.

Cause Area specificity

Another thing to probably start thinking about is a list of topic tags which can be affixed to the end of conference names, now that members of the community are thinking about cause-area-specific events – e.g. The 2024 EAGx Bio Summit, The 2030 EAGx AI Conference.

^{^}
I hope that the level of professionalism and polish of EAGxBoston 2022 will reset the EA community’s expectation/understanding of the “x” in EAGx, and that EAs of all levels of experience and professionalism will be more excited to attend EAGxs in the future.

Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2022-06-09T19:07 (+20)

I agree that the current names aren't ideal. A mix of thoughts:

Agree that the "x" is misleading. It could be interested to considering throwing out the EAGx branding and see what we come up with (keeping in mind that there are costs of rebranding)
- I ran the EA Fellowship Weekend which was targeted at people going through the virtual fellowship program - don't think it's ideal, but it was clear that this was for newer people since it's for people going through the fellowship
- a name signalling that this is a local or regional community-driven event (vs. CEA team planning in a particular location) could be good?
- words that positively signal being new as a postive, e.g. related to exploring, investigating, discovery, experimentation - you're on the start of an exciting adventure or something?
We need an "EAGxx" to be what an EAGx used to be (an event where people with minimal knowledge of EA can attend, much more top-of-funnel). In some regions, this would be very useful.
- These conferences could not use EAGx branding altogether, and possibly not even reference EA in the title if it makes sense, and just make it clear that EA Group X is running it / it's funded by CEA (if it is). E.g. Catalyst was a really cool name for a biosecurity summit that was run a few years back.
- Also: Communicate to people that the bar for EAGx has increased since before to people having at least a basic understanding of EA
RE: cause area - What's the value of adding EAGx to the branding of a cause-specific summit? I imagine that people in the community will know it's organized by EAs, and for people outside the community it could be at best neutral but at worst confusing or off-putting if they aren't interested in EA. But wonder if I'm missing something?

I'm really bad with names, so I haven't suggested specific examples.

OllieBase @ 2022-06-15T11:21 (+4)

[I worked with Kaleem on EAGxBoston and think I'm responsible for (re)naming EAGx]

Thanks for writing this up!

In the past, it seems like the community has typically considered EAGxs to be an event which is smaller in scale, less professionally organized, and aimed at a different audience compared to EAGs (maybe EAGs are for highly engaged and/or experienced members of the community, whereas EAGxs are for those who are newer to EA, like people who had just completed an intro fellowship)

This is still basically how we're thinking about them (though I think they're much more professionally organised now, thanks to larger budgets). The "x" also denotes independently organised and I think that is a useful distinction to make. I definitely could make this clearer though :)

FWIW, I think EAGxBoston was unusually large and attracted EAs of all stripes because it was the first post-pandemic conference in the US. I think it's possible you're updating too much on that when thinking about how to categorise events and that future EAGx conferences in the US will be more obviously different, though still polished and professionally organised.

That said, this prompted me to think harder about whether EAGx is the right name. I'm sure you'll hear from me once I get time to think about this (it isn't high priority for me).