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.
Honesty, because community norms
The conference itself was incredible, specifically the best weekend I can remember. Dishonest elements in the marketing beforehand seemed destructive to long-term coordination. Less important short-term effects included
I switched from 'trust everyone at CEA except...' to 'distrust everyone at CEA except...', which is a wasteful position to have to take
dodgy emails convinced approximately -1 of the 12 people I nominated to attend, and now some of my friends who were interested in EA associate it with deception
I believe we should be truly honest when feasible, but at the very least we should not lie outside of extreme circumstances.
[Clarification: I still think it's correct to assign higher default credence to the claims of CEA staff than those of most people, just not the extremely high credence I would like to use. I used the term 'distrust' in an idiosyncratic fashion, which was dumb, and I apologise for not picking this up earlier. 'Be sceptical' would have been more appropriate.]
Do you mean the automated "you're a cool person, come to EA" emails or something else? FWIW I thought those were pretty childish.