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.
A list of the main benefits (and costs?) of the event
Conferences are complicated things. I'd be curious to understand as a community what exactly we want to get out of them. The better an understanding there is, the more I imagine it could be optimized.
Some ideas:
It would be super sweet to see an EV breakdown of the main benefits.
I agree that thinking explicitly about the goals of the conference would be good. Fwiw, though, my instinct is that trying to quantify it into an EV estimate would be a bit of a distraction from the main benefits.