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.
This is a great idea. There were some tables for animal welfare, XRisk, etc. in the main hall at EAG, and a few ad-hoc discussion groups were put together from the email list in the EAG Connect spreadsheet, but formalizing this a bit more and maybe adding a loose agenda to them would be a good idea.
One idea is to do the same thing as this year with EAG Connect, but then let people choose one cause to be in a discussion group about, for which one time slot during the conference is reserved for 20-person groups (maybe 10-15 will show up) to discuss the cause. I think that could be very valuable and maybe a more specific way for people to meet people who care about the cause they're interested in.