First, I wanted to thank all of the Effective Altruism Global organizers and participants. I found it to be very valuable and overall well put together. There was obviously a ton of work put into it, most by conference organizers who I don't believe will get that much credit for it, and I very much commend their work.
That said, there's always a lot of room for new ideas, and I find I often get a bunch of ideas at and after these conferences. Because of the EAGx events, ideas described now may be able to be put into action somewhat soon and experimented with.
As may be expected, I recommend that people make all of their ideas be independent comments, then upvote the ideas that they think would be the most useful.
Not having the group photo.
The group photo always seems to take 20 minutes or so. It's kind of fun, but times the number of participants, (1k?), that's ~300 hours, or around $10k of value. Is it worth it? I'm skeptical, but could see it.
The counterfactual to the photo is people talking to each other at the conference. Since people talk on the way to the photo and right up until it's taken, the per-person value lost is not 20 minutes, but far less.
Also, I'd gladly pay $10K for the photo even if that's what it cost. I think we easily make that up by increasing marginal EAG attendees for next year.