Attendee to organizer time ratios

Parties and fun events have really high attendee:organizer time ratios
- Maybe works because people entertain each other in a party?
- Or because parties are good at marketing themselves?
- Or because expectations tend to be lower for a party?
Organizers probably prefer high ratios
- Economies of scale: usually cheap, on the margin, to add more people
  - Amortizes ~fixed cost of planning across more folks
- Also takeaway: extending your event time is an easy way to get higher ratios
Attendees get more value out of low ratios?
- More organizer time per attendee time = better experience
- Similar to in school: students prefer individualized instruction (Bloom’s two-sigma)
- Explains why Trading Camp should cost so much
Conferences involve a lot of planning and upfront cost from organizer, attending one is participating in a kind of distilled
- Curious about how unconference-y events stack up
Kind of want to get Mox time ratio up
- Right now it’s in an early state. Curious how it compares to Constellation or FAR
  - Steady state, should be able to support 20ppl : 1 staff?
- Though: maybe venue ratios are just different than event ratios

How do we improve organizer efficiency or productivity?
- Tooling, software like Airtable and Partiful?
- Good venues like Lighthaven (and someday Mox)?
- Putting “attendees” to work
What would a hypothetical event that maximizes ratio be?
- Many people (party), or very long (retreat, ski trip)
- Or: very little organizer time (autopilot, like Taco Tuesday)

Not sure credit allocation is being done correctly in these examples. Might be double-counting or undercounting, esp on venue vs organizer
- eg for Mox (venue host) vs QTB (organizer), or Lighthaven vs Summer Camp
Of course, not all attendee time is created equal!
- Different kinds of yield from an event
  - Immediate enjoyment
  - Different kinds of relationships formed
  - Learnings and takeaways
- Quality-adjusted attendee-hours
  - Methodology to collect this?
    - Ask people how much they would pay per hour?
    - Or observe how much they actually pay.
    - Or observe the opportunity cost of the people present (eg higher for famous speakers)
    - Ask people of ratios of time for equal “value” (1h at Manifest vs 3h at minifest)?
And not all organizer time is created equal
- Fulltime organizers have different opportunity costs
  - Eg technical staff might have much higher opportunity costs, but their taste may be important for a hackathon or technical event
- Planning logistics for an event vs day-of operations are different
- Meta events like Manifest or Summer Camp have sub-organizers
Other costs to organize an event:
- “relationship” cost, to send invites
- money, to pay for food/venue/etc
- focus or “top idea in your head” cost
- calendar-time (not just clock time)