Could I record the audio of my own post?

I'd like to make a brief note on the importance of translating EA content because I've often encountered a general idea which is something like "as a movement, we are basically mainly interested in people who already speak English so they'd just read the original and the translation wouldn't bring any additional benefit". 

An answer to this could be a standalone forum post, but in short:

• There are in fact, very talented people who could make great contributions to the movement who for a number of reasons don't communicate in English that well. If our outreach is in English only, we will likely miss them.
• Even if someone seems quite competent in their command of English but it may still impact their willingness to consume English content, and even if they do, they may not enjoy it as much because their comprehension is not 100%.
• It seems that reading text in your primary language lands differently, especially when you want the reader to connect with the material emotionally. Reading it in your primary language seems to increase the extent to which you're able to internalize the message (especially for someone with low comprehension skills in English)
• A lot of EA material is already targeted at the English-speaking world and it can feel alienating - like it's not REALLY meant for me. Sure, EA sounds interesting but it's something for OTHER people, not me, living in *insert a small foreign city*.

Hi Gregory, I will be running these workshops together with John, so I'd like to respond to your comments. 

I think that it is fair for you to post your warning/recommendation but as far as I can tell, today's CFAR is quite different from the organization that you say demonstrated "gross negligence and utter corporate incompetence" in the past. You say that the evidence is sparse that anything has changed and I'm not sure about that but I'm also not the person to make that case because I'm not CFAR - I'm a CFAR developer running a project with other CFAR developers and a couple of CFAR core staff. 

I can only speak for myself as one of the co-leads of this project and what I can say is that we see the skulls. They're a bit hard to ignore since they're everywhere! But that is exactly why we think we have enough of an understanding of what happened and how to learn from it. We are very much aware of the previous mistakes and believe that we can do better. And we want to try because we think these workshops are good and important and that we can do them well. 

I generally think that people and organizations deserve second chances but ultimately it is for the people to decide. We will be fulfilling our role as event organizers by mitigating risks to our participants, to the extent that we reasonably can (based on CFAR's past mistakes and also based on our own experience and judgment). And our participants will decide if they trust us enough to come to an immersive workshop with a bunch of other humans who they will interact with for 4.5 days. 

Hi Brian,  I hope that you'll eventually be able to make it to the workshops, we certainly hope that there will be more next year.

Eventually, we would like to update the website but we have limited capacity and we were focused on getting the dates and applications out there as early as we knew they were happening so people could pencil in the dates. Now we are also running admissions, coordinating staff, working on content and logistics etc. Given all of this,  it will likely take us a couple of more weeks to update.

I know you explain it later in the post, but I would prefer that the phrase "tell the person what you think their problems are" not be used to describe people offering doom. IMHO it's very bad if people think about it this way.

The framing that seems more accurate to me is something like "why will this person have failed in their efforts?" Basically, how do you think they are doomed, hence the doom circle. You are trying to see how things are going to play out for them and should they not succeed, what happened?

My two cents about why people may be concerned about the decision-making process without having concrete details:
For instance, the initially advertised decision timeline of 2 weeks. While I appreciate the fast pace and the benefits that come with it, a complex system of review and decision-making is almost impossible to achieve at that timeline, especially given the interest in the program. 

Moreover, that deadline was not met for all projects which is both good because clearly more time was needed and also bad because applicants' expectations were not met and they needed to potentially change their plans for the projects because of the dealy. Additionally, it signals FTX's poor understanding of either its capacity or the complexity of the grant-making process. Lack of either doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

I'm not aware of anything, in particular, happening in Prague that weekend that would explain the hotels in the downtown area being full. Prague is a very popular city that is coming back from two bad winters with COVID so it seems that people are simply eager to visit.

We did put together a guide on public transportation so people are comfortable booking outside of the city center and also had a couchsurfing table for people to advertise and look for spare accommodation.

We decided to do the conference in the city center because we think it is a beautiful area that we wanted to share with our attendees. There seems to be an existing tension in the community on whether to do conferences in large convention centers at an arbitrary location or in unique spaces which are an inherent part of the conference experience.

We were considering doing a group order for accommodation to help out the attendees but we did not have enough capacity on the team to do it. I've done this for another conference in the past and it is A LOT of work to assign people, deal with changes, communicate with the hotel etc. 

You pay for the ticket at the registration stage depending on what you can afford. The baseline price is 50 EUR and then you can apply a 25%, 50%, or 75% discount. You can also ask for financial assistance to be able to attend the conference.

Ha, amusing indeed! Fixed now. :)