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).
I am somewhat surprised by some of these choices, and I'd be somewhat interested in hearing more about the reasoning (but no problem if you think it's too time-consuming to explain).
Re catering, here's my quick, very low-confidence estimate:
What do you mean by this? I don't get why the policy shouldn't be "always accept people if they are above a certain bar". Perhaps the bar should change, but it feels to me like the obvious way of deciding who to accept should be something like "for everyone who wants to attend, estimate how much value it would produce for them to attend, and estimate how costly it would be, and then accept everyone where value exceeds benefits". It sounds like you're suggesting doing something else--what other policy are you suggesting following?
We've looked into this very briefly for EAG, and my understanding is that there aren't many (large) venues for which this would work well. Most of our venues require us to spend a minimum amount of money on food and beverage, there often isn't a clear location where food trucks would park, and most venues don't let you bring in outside food into the venue (meaning that if it's raining for example, attendees would have to eat their food truck lunches outside).
These aren't slam down points, mostly because I'm not 100% confident how food trucks would work, an... (read more)