J

JanaKiara

Operations Associate @ EV Ops
62 karmaJoined Jul 2020Working (0-5 years)

Bio

Participation
3

Background experience in several areas, ranging from UX, software design and development to event organisation, community building and politics.

See my LinkedIn.

You can best reach me at jana@ev.org 

All views are my own.

Comments
4

I find the genre Hopepunk incredibly inspiring. Vox article about Hopepunk;

Here's a Spotify playlist, which has some of the best songs of the genre.

Highlighting a couple of my favorites:

  • Be Afraid by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit (Spotify): "Be afraid, be very afraid. And then do it anyway" (AI alignment, anyone?)
  • Matches by Guante, Dem Atlas (Spotify): "The reason that I'm not a nihilist is that some day I wanna live like in Star Trek. And I know that we'll never build starships until we tackle poverty, war, and hardship." 
    • Guante is my personal favorite overall! His album A Love Song, a Death Rattle, a Battle (Spotify) gets me through any motivation slump.
  • Be More Kind by Frank Turner (Spotify): "In a world that has decided that it's going to lose it's mind, be more kind, my friends. Try to be more kind."

many others work jobs for which they can't easily take time off for our event

 

Potential counter-argument(s): 
- some EA organisations count this as work-time anyway, so it might not matter; 
- in general, some organisations have a self-development time-budget where people are allowed/supposed to take up to X days a year for conferences and workshops (usually 5, I think), so might be worth looking into;

I think this kind of post is so important and should get highlighted on the front page every time shortly before an EAG. Just so people get reminded that this is a thing.

For a more personal addition:
I found EAG and now the days afterwards really difficult to navigate. It was my first (I've been to one EAGx before). I knew I was supposed to schedule 1:1s, but didn't, because I didn't really have a goal for EAG. I have a job that I like and want to keep doing for a bit. There was no particular question I had for anyone. I just wanted to be there, see a few talks, see some friends again, that's about it. 

At the same time, I felt so much pressure to "make the most of it". There's so much talk about what "the perfect amount of 1:1s" is, that "EAG is an incredible opportunity", almost like it's a "once-in-a-lifetime"-thing. I even got mocked by a few people for not scheduling more 1:1s. And it's just... really anxiety-inducing.

Really liked the idea of having a space where people are explicitly invited to sit with a stranger (and think this should be improved upon in the future), because it's a nice addition if you don't have a talk to attend but also didn't schedule something else in. 

So my takeaway is: It's okay that people have wildly different experiences at EAG. It's okay to not know what exactly you want to get out of the conference. And it's okay to just have a chill time there.