Who’s here
Note that this doc is currently restricted to Manifest/Manifold + Lightcone, but I’d like to ideally make public, so try not to write in things you want kept private (save it for IRL discussion)
Links
Meeting goals
- Discuss the future of Manifest & LessOnline
- Discuss general learnings and improvements for future events at Lighthaven
Overall takes on the festival
Sort your section by importance & uniqueness (different from what others are saying)
[bp - Ben]
- To discuss
- [bp] I feel like I want to process “Summer Camp was like 10x less staff investment and yet just worked.” Actually as I think about it I’m not sure how much I believe that, the price for most people was crazy cheap, and many fewer people went. Still, I think it’s worth reflecting on if there’s something here to take advantage of.
- [bp] I guess I’m interested in talking about worlds where we do something much bigger next year, and also worlds where one or both of our teams scale down investment next year.
- e.g. how excited are we about adding a third conference? making summer camp be 2-4 weeks? how much bigger do we want to go? how could we cut our staff time-investment into these events?
- Could be longer — Zvi was like “Can’t come for 2 weeks, but could go for opposite at the end of a much longer summer camp”
- Conferences can get bigger
- Could find a 3rd weekend
- Some other events workshopped: Rationalist festival of the arts; AI stuff
- [rh] Quant trading bootcamp went really well, very smooth
- complaint Many sessions weren’t planned, would be better if they were deliberate or planned
- [bp] Could be more writing workshops
- [sm] Talking to Edge Esmeralda [bp, rafe] are going
- [sc] Might run into a dropoff for 2-3 weeks
- [bp] Don’t expect people to stay for the whole thing
- [sc] Price point might be a sticking point
- [bp] gave 30-50 reduced ticket prices
- [oh] Summer camp was basically at cost
- [sm] Cost: Sell tickets at higher tickets that just let people support
- Only had 1 supporter ticket, could have sold more earlier
- [a] Why wait until next year?
- Biggest cost is paying for the venue
- [bp] If we invest in an events team, Ben could run a DoomCon in 3 months, and a web serial con afterwards
- [oh] Opportunity cost of clients — schelling points of running things
- Event was going to pay $50k that was same weekend
- [rw] Manifest is getting too big; might have 2 a year
- Doesn’t fit in the venue,
- [sm] Agree with disliking sequels more than imagined
- Look forward to running an event that was very different
- Liked that LO was scary, didn’t know what was going to happen
- [oh] Central virtues: In a world of nerds who will only do a thing once, Oli will be here for the 7th year in a row, so people can build stuff on top of
- Please, do things many times, so people can start building a social ecosystem on top of it. Start making things on top of the ecosystem
- Very different skillset from 0-1 than 1-10. But many people on the team fall into a trap
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[bp] A lot of a different events. Eg a forecastathon one could run, with different energies
- I am going to read some feedback stuff first.
- I note that the overcrowding was a thing that we want to do better on in future big events like this, especially around the bathrooms. Some chance it’s worth us building an extra bathroom in some common space.
- [sm] +1, particularly re: bathrooms
- [rh] +1 bathrooms
- I think the big area of improvement is better 1-1 facilitation. I don’t like the business-like 30 mins of EAG, but I think I personally wished I could get more out of it, so I’d want to problem solve that for the future. Some easy way to register that you’d like to 1-1 with folks. I felt anxious DM’ing 1 person for it, and often spent time finding nobody or looking for an individual and failing, and then having a half-interaction with them in a group context.
- [sm] +1. i think speedfriending and misha’s cocktail party were good for this, but definitely insufficient, and we should’ve done more to facilitate the second step of actually reaching out.