Taymon's Quick takes

Taymon

I'm starting to think that the EA Global meetup format might not be optimal. At the very least, I didn't get as much out of it this year as I was hoping to, and the same thing happened last year, and I suspect others might have been in the same position. (At one meetup, others I talked to expressed frustrations similar to my own.) Here are some thoughts on why, and how it might be improved.

For context: Meetups are the most frequent type of event on the EA Global schedule other than talks. There are meetups for people working in a particular cause area (e.g., nuclear risk, digital sentience, or community building) or with a particular skillset (e.g., earning to give, operations, or communications). There are also affinity-group meetups (e.g., for particular demographic minority groups), but I didn't attend any of those and the theory of what they're for seems different, so here I'm primarily talking about the cause area and skillset ones.

The way the meetups I attended worked was this: There were a bunch of tables in a room, and people sat around them and were encouraged to have conversations. Every ten to fifteen minutes, the organizer would ring a bell and tell people to stop their current conversations and switch to a different table with different people. At some meetups, the tables had cards indicating a particular conversation topic; at others, the organizer would offer a discussion prompt for the whole room at the start of each round; at others, it was entirely freeform.

(There were also meetups that had a different, "speed meeting" format; I didn't attend any of these, but my understanding is that you'd have a series of time-limited one-on-one conversations with a random person, instead of group conversations. Interestingly, the meetups that used this format were the ones for the largest cause areas (e.g., global poverty, animal welfare, or AI safety); I'm not sure if there was a specific reason for that or if it was just a coincidence.)

I'm of course not in a position to know what are the intended outcomes of this format, but I have a vague guess. CEA's events team has indicated fairly consistently that they think that most of the value of EA Global comes from one-on-one meetings; attendees are strongly encouraged to schedule a lot of these. A ten-minute conversation is just long enough to establish some amount of common interest and exchange contact information (or just names, given the availability of Swapcard), and so the meetup format could serve as a way of generating 1:1 connections. The "speed meeting" format probably does this more effectively in any given case, but with fewer people, so maybe the group-discussion format maximizes surface area for 1:1 connections.

I personally didn't find this, or more generally a 1:1-centric approach to EA Global, especially useful, for two reasons:

I think it works better if everyone involved is a social butterfly who likes doing open-ended networking. This does not describe me; although I don't get a lot of 1:1 invitations anymore, I did in earlier years when I was more actively involved in EA community building, and while I had a good experience when someone had a specific agenda, I found ones without one unpleasant, stressful, and draining. I don't know exactly how prevalent it is, but my suspicion is that it's probably not all that rare. I'll also observe that the advice around 1:1s has softened in recent years; although it's still encouraged to schedule a lot of them, it's also now more encouraged to have a specific purpose for each one, and it's more explicitly stated that it's okay to turn down 1:1s.
There exist situations where a group conversation is more directly useful than a 1:1. In my case, for example, I was hoping to get a better general sense of the state of EA community building, what people's theories of change are, and what kind of work they think should be getting done but isn't; this is the kind of thing that I'd hope could help me get back into the space after a several-year hiatus. This is a poor fit for 1:1s because I didn't know who to talk to (just looking up the "EA community building" category on Swapcard didn't really provide enough specifics to answer this) and also didn't have a specific ask or agenda. Talking to a bunch of people at once, where any of them can contribute whatever relevant perspective they have, seems more valuable for this use case.

The following ideas could possibly make meetups more conducive to substantive conversations on decision-relevant topics:

Don't interrupt conversations every ten minutes. If a substantive conversation is happening, it will have just started to gain momentum by then. People should instead be encouraged to circulate tables if they haven't found a conversation worth sticking with.
Prefer the format where each table is for a different topic or question, so that people can self-sort by what conversations they want to have.
Use discussion questions that are substantive and decision-relevant. Some meetups I attended (like the earning-to-give one) were already doing this, but others were not.
Going further, it might be worth finding out in advance from attendees what kinds of discussion topics are decision-relevant to them. (E.g., in a previous year, there was a community-building meetup where strategy/theory-of-change was not one of the topics; I suspect I wasn't the only one there who would have found this relevant.) Maybe there's a way to do this in Swapcard with the question-submission feature or something similar.

One other possibility that occurs to me is that there might be capacity constraints in play; the current format isn't very demanding of volunteer time, and that might be important since volunteer time is presumably at a premium during the event. I'm not sure what to do about this, but I do think there's probably someone at the event who's sufficiently invested in any given meetup that they'd be willing to put in the time to make it go well. Possibly it might be worth recruiting people specifically to run meetups, separately from the regular volunteer pool. (In particular, you'd recruit someone who's an expert in the relevant cause area or skillset, and is sufficiently interested in doing community-building around it to have some idea of what conversations are useful for people to have.)

Taymon

8mo

Building EA

I personally didn't find this, or more generally a 1:1-centric approach to EA Global, especially useful, for two reasons:

I think it works better if everyone involved is a social butterfly who likes doing open-ended networking. This does not describe me; although I don't get a lot of 1:1 invitations anymore, I did in earlier years when I was more actively involved in EA community building, and while I had a good experience when someone had a specific agenda, I found ones without one unpleasant, stressful, and draining. I don't know exactly how prevalent it is, but my suspicion is that it's probably not all that rare. I'll also observe that the advice around 1:1s has softened in recent years; although it's still encouraged to schedule a lot of them, it's also now more encouraged to have a specific purpose for each one, and it's more explicitly stated that it's okay to turn down 1:1s.
There exist situations where a group conversation is more directly useful than a 1:1. In my case, for example, I was hoping to get a better general sense of the state of EA community building, what people's theories of change are, and what kind of work they think should be getting done but isn't; this is the kind of thing that I'd hope could help me get back into the space after a several-year hiatus. This is a poor fit for 1:1s because I didn't know who to talk to (just looking up the "EA community building" category on Swapcard didn't really provide enough specifics to answer this) and also didn't have a specific ask or agenda. Talking to a bunch of people at once, where any of them can contribute whatever relevant perspective they have, seems more valuable for this use case.

The following ideas could possibly make meetups more conducive to substantive conversations on decision-relevant topics:

Don't interrupt conversations every ten minutes. If a substantive conversation is happening, it will have just started to gain momentum by then. People should instead be encouraged to circulate tables if they haven't found a conversation worth sticking with.
Prefer the format where each table is for a different topic or question, so that people can self-sort by what conversations they want to have.
Use discussion questions that are substantive and decision-relevant. Some meetups I attended (like the earning-to-give one) were already doing this, but others were not.
Going further, it might be worth finding out in advance from attendees what kinds of discussion topics are decision-relevant to them. (E.g., in a previous year, there was a community-building meetup where strategy/theory-of-change was not one of the topics; I suspect I wasn't the only one there who would have found this relevant.) Maybe there's a way to do this in Swapcard with the question-submission feature or something similar.