All of Dion🔸's Comments + Replies
Thanks for the comment. We were largely constrained by venue availability and pricing. Having it a week later would run too close to Christmas, raising venue prices and potentially limiting the attendance of people who celebrate the holiday. Overall, 2024 is also an unusually popular year to get married, and most large event spaces are booked until February 2025.
We did consider the availability of local students but only had access to public calendars, which state that the vacation should start after December 7th. (NUS, NTU, SMU) It might also be helpful t...
Hi Spencer! It might be a good idea to start a public channel in EA Anywhere and then transition to a separate workspace once the group gains traction and/or obtains funding for a paid workspace. Being on a free plan means potentially losing messages older than 90 days. It might also be really hard for one person to engage and moderate an entire Slack community without being compensated.
Here's more information on the support that EA Anywhere can provide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wWW_shnEZyi011l-znoFFdRiIiUZi2S37DBip6xIN20/edit
Hi Jonathan!
I'm Dion from EAGxSingapore, one of the two community contact people for the event. I'm sorry you felt this way during the conference and wanted to clarify some points.
- We did not monitor attendee interactions or 1-1s during the conference. The only exception where we kept track of attendees was for the underaged participants, as alcohol was served during the event. This was explicitly stated to the affected individuals.
- It was a priority for us to have a local community contact person. (Me!) However, I (personally) felt that our other cont
I couldn't help laughing at myself after reading your comment as it seemed that I connected two unrelated dots: the presence of community health, and staff looking around for trash.
Thank you for the clarifications, Dion, and for the terrific job you did organizing EAGxSingapore! I wish I could say this in person while I was at the conference, but I saw you were constantly in a "socially exhausted" mode, so I kept my mouth shut. It's great to e-meet you here and finally get this chance :)
Thanks for pointing this out, it is an important consideration, and this might not be a good exercise depending on the audience present.
For EAGxSG, it was definitely being more afraid that the audience would err on the side of not asking for help. I also checked with some experienced EAs at the conference on whether or not this was something I should mention. Context: The attendees of EAGxSG were mainly from areas without large established EA communities (Africa, Asia, Middle East), and many of them would likely not be able to go to other conferences due t...
My favourite thing about using the word retreat (that also comes with the downside of point 2) is a sense of intentional community building that other terms like workshop and summit don't capture. On top of this, it seems pretty clear that EAs relate to and run retreats quite differently from the average person. My sense is that we might run into similar issues with any other term we pick, e.g. parties at a 'workshop' or intense work rooms at a 'team-building event'.
It might be worth coining a new term similar to how we have made EAG/x a common word instead of relying solely on the word 'conference'. I don't have any meaningful creative inputs on this yet, but the low bar would probably be something along the lines of EA___.
Adding onto this, the Virtual Programs (Introductory) currently has 3 weeks dedicated to Longtermism, Existential Risks and Emerging Technologies whereas there are little to no compulsory content on poverty, global health or climate change. (except Pandemics) Many of my participants have voiced out on this. If facilitators are not able to give a good answer, it can be easy for newcomers to have a skewed perspective that EA is just longtermism and x-risk.
Hey Nishit,
Thank you for writing this post and voicing your concern for the attendees. I’m the CEA Coordinator in charge of the event, and was one of the core decision-makers for having this event in New Delhi in December this year.
Before choosing this city and date, we consulted with many local senior EAs and tried our best to weigh the trade-offs. Some of the considerations included:
- Attendee data from both EAGxIndia 2023 (Jaipur) and 2024 (Bangalore) showed that a large majority of attendees are from the Delhi and New Delhi area.
- The team had many other p
... (read more)Hello Dion,
As somebody with reasonable familiarity with EA India community, and somebody who still spends significant time as a Delhi resident every year, I have a few things to add.
While I cannot divine which reference class is being denoted by "many local senior EAs" (or for that matter, what constitutes 'seniority' in a largely diffused community), nor do I have access the teleological specifics at play (what are the specific motivations to even hold an EAGx in this instance), I do feel compelled to point out that I personally know several active commun... (read more)