TL;DR: Spending on events run and supported by CEA (including EA Global and EAGx conferences) will likely be reduced due to a decrease in available funding. This might influence travel grants, catering, volunteering, ticketing, and non-critical conference expenses.
The CEA events team is responsible for numerous events in the EA community, including EA Global, EAGx, and various retreat programs. We (the CEA events team) expect to reduce spending on events we run in the coming year due to:
- The FTX situation
- The reduction in funds available to Open Philanthropy (partially due to a general stock market decline)
- The growth of the EA community — meaning that grantmakers now have more alternative funding opportunities. i.e., we’re no longer one of the very few things available for them to fund (this is a good thing!)
At this stage, we’re still navigating the new funding landscape and we aren’t sure what this means going forwards, but some potential consequences include:
- Travel grant funding will likely be more restrictive. Previously we’ve funded people to travel to any EA conference they’ve been accepted to. We expect to retain some amount of travel funding moving forwards, but we’ll likely have to be much more conservative about how much we give and who we give it to. When planning around an event, we’d recommend you act under the assumption that we will not be able to grant your travel funding request (unless it has already been approved).
- Catering will likely be cut down. We’ll likely have to stop providing all three of breakfast, lunch, and dinner on each day for our conferences — we still expect to have some food or snacks available, but it’s currently unclear exactly what we’ll be able to provide.
- We might go back to a volunteer model for people working at EA Global (we trialed paying “volunteers” at the last two EA Globals).
- We might introduce a variable pricing ticketing system where we ask people with higher incomes to pay more for their tickets (we expect to still have free and reduced cost tickets available for students and those on lower incomes).
- We might need to limit capacity at certain events (whereas previously we always accepted people if they were above a certain bar).
If you have any questions or concerns, you can email us at hello@eaglobal.org or comment below (though we may not be able to respond to all comments).
Thanks for your detailed comment! I work on the events team so I can add some info.
Yep, we broadly agree here. We're keen to open and review applications earlier than we have been doing, for many of the reasons you mention. It's something we've been actively working on for a while, but unfortunately we have been dealing with a variety of bottlenecks on this front. We have designed a new application system for EAG 2023, which will open very soon. It's an application for all of the EAGs in 2023, rather than on a conference by conference basis. So, once people are accepted, they can then register (and plan/book travel for) any of the announced EAGs in 2023.
EAGx admissions are done by their respective organising teams, as they are community hosted. CEA just supports them, so we can't directly control their admissions turnaround, but we are making systems improvements that the EAGx teams can benefit from too. This will hopefully help somewhat!