EA - Project Idea: Lots of Cause-area-specific Online Unconferences by Linda Linsefors

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: Project Idea: Lots of Cause-area-specific Online Unconferences, published by Linda Linsefors on February 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Here's a project idea I have that's been laying around for some time. I think this would be high impact, but I need help to make it happen. It don't have to be this exact setup (which I describe below) as long as the output are more online unconferences for the EA community.I don't do grant applications anymore, due to past event that I'm still emotionally healing from. However if you want to write and submit an application on my behalf, that would be very welcome.Project description can also be found here: Lots of EA Online Unconferences - Google DocsTotal budget: $40k - 85k.Summary: We need more online events - from my experience running TAISU and AISU, there are many smart people who can’t access existing events because of geographical constraints. I expect this to be true of other cause areas too. I want to hire one person for one year and teach them how to run an online unconference. They’ll run 3-4 events on different EA topics of their choice. If things go well, they secure more funding before the end of the year, and keep going.MotivationOnline unconferences are low cost and relatively low effort to run, and are also really great. I think this type of event has the highest cost to value ratio out of any event type that I know of.Why more events?EA is growing faster than the infrastructure can keep up with. I’m mostly familiar with AI Safety but I expect the situation to be similar in other areas. Every AI Safety event I know about gets a massive number of applications. There is definitely room for more events.Why cause area specific?Generic EA events are great, but when you’ve picked what problem to work on, it’s much more valuable to connect with people who are interested in the same cause area as you. Those are the people you can have high context discussion with. Those are the people you can team up with to get work done.I count “EA Meta” (e.g. ops, events etc) as a cause area for the purpose of this project, because it seems valuable for people who work in this area to meet up and exchange ideas, and find common solutions to common problems.Why unconferences?Unconferences are great in many ways, but they are especially great in a rapidly growing movement, where the people at the top, can’t keep up with or even keep track of the need for infrastructure. Unconferences are self organised around the needs of interests of the participants. This makes them more adaptive but also lower effort to run relatively to other types of events.I’m not saying that unconferences are a one-size-fits-all type of event. There is definitely room for more specialised events too. But everything equal, I think EA would be better off with more unconferences.Why online?Online and offline have different pros and cons.One big advantage with online events is that they are much more accessible. This is important! Even if we have lots of in person events, it’s worth having online events too. Accessibility helps in two ways. Firstly there are people who can’t attend otherwise for various reasons. Just paying for their travel may not help since the barrier might be time or visa. Secondly, it lowers the cost (in time and money) to attend for everyone. People who would not be willing to pay the time cost for an entire in-person event often choose to join in for just a few sessions of an online event, benefiting both them and everyone else. Allowing people to pick and choose among sessions, rather than commit to a full event, opens up for more specialised sessions.The other main advantage of online events is that they are almost infinitely scalable, much less work to organise, and much lower organising costs. A single person can d...