EA - Announcing the EA Gather Town Event Hall as a global hub for online events by Emrik

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the EA Gather Town Event Hall as a global hub for online events, published by Emrik on August 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The EAGT Event Hall (contact) is a virtual space neighbouring the main EA Gather Town (EAGT) for hosting conferences, talks, discussion groups, and more. It looks kinda like a game, but whatever, I think there are strong reasons to prefer this platform over alternatives. More on that later. We're testing the space for the first time with our unconference on Sunday 12:30 UTC. We'd appreciate it if you joined to help us test it out! You'll also be helping us kickstart something that might turn into a noteworthy part of EA infrastructure. Our hope is that this will be one of many online events organically hosted here by various EA groups around the world. The main point of this post is that having a central venue for online events will help build and maintain an always-active meeting place for the EA community. Events hosted in the Hall will help familiarise people with using the space generally for coworking together, making connections, and having valuable conversations. Insofar as EAG conferences produce value by connecting people from across the world who then fly back to where they live, EAGT produces value for many of the same reasons without having to pay for the flight ticket in advance. How does it work? When I step near another person's character, our audio and video connects and I can engage them in a heated debate on the monistic ontology of blueberry muffins. Alternatively, I could book Auditorium A and lecture an entire hall about it. When I'm next to one of the microphones, I can broadcast to the entire room, but I cannot hear anyone in the audience unless I right-click to "spotlight" them. This comes in handy when e.g. they have their hand raised and I want their question to be heard by everyone. The audience hearing range is limited to include the speaker and the two people sitting right next to them. This allows them to speak to their neighbours if they wish without disturbing anyone else. Example event: The Unconference The easiest way to explain what you can do in the space is probably just to take you through our agenda for the unconference as an example. Feel free to take notes, or contact us and we'd be happy to help organise something here or just answer your questions. Before the event, we've emailed a document with some information for the speakers to help prepare them for the event. 1. Courtyard & intro When first logging into the space, everyone will spawn near the Earth portal (see image) that links the EAGT Event Hall and the EA coworking and lounge space, where the community is usually found coworking, talking, or socialising. When the event starts, Nguyên will give an introduction (broadcasting from the stage in the image) and share some practical information (like the fact that you can raise your hand with 6 and put it down again with 0). We will then proceed through the door northeast of the stage. 2. Foyer & browsing From the Foyer, all the session rooms can be found. The full schedule is linked via the big blue poster but you can also see it on the signs above each room. Two sessions will be held in parallel, and the participants may decide for themselves which room to enter. They are also encouraged to just roam, connect, and explore the main space through the portal. 3. Session rooms & group discussions & embeddable Padlets Each session lasts 30 minutes, but how it's structured is up to the speakers. For example, they could talk for 5 minutes, have 5 minutes for taking questions directly from the audience, and then 20 minutes where each table discusses among themselves and jots ideas/feedback down on their Padlets (unique per table). There are a maximum of 5 chairs per table, because bigg...