From the perspective of Manifold using the venue — some things that might help for the next conference!

During the event

• Publicity norms

  • You probably know this but the “declining WSJ/WaPo journalists” thing hurt a lot, I estimated $5-10k of cost to us
    • [Oli] Even the one journalist here was like a doubling of staff stress. Constant sense of conversation — need to fear that journalist will adverserially publish. Feel very confused. Pre-FTX, would never event journalist. Post— a bit more appreciative. Have spent a full decade interacting with journalists regretting
    • Oli: really do quite care about privacy, not for PR risk reasons, still confused post FTX
      • Not PR-risk — journalists commonly show up, pretend to speak on who is present, in a way that is hard to correct. Repeated experience: go to events/private parties, take a bunch of quotes, sometimes make things up, people just get wrong impressions, and there’s no way to correct it
    • Oli: certain aspects aren’t compatible with being fully transparent
    • The thing that would have worked well: we provide a lot of interfaces, high-trust
      • Hesitant about journalism — want to understand
      • Obvious neutral ground was to be able to invite journalists? Is the case — was expected to be — and journalists had come at any time
  • Also generally stuff around photographs. Perhaps syncing up on the “goals from Manifold side” would have helped?

• Comms between Manifold <> Lightcone

  • General not super clear to us who was in charge at any point in time (Oli? Meia? Ehssan?), different people needed different things
  • Unclear ownership of lots of things
    • Between Lightcone and Manifest team
    • Between individuals on either team
  • Lots of running around getting people’s sign off eg on the afterparty, but also all throughout
  • Not great that we had both Slack and Discord as places to contact and monitor (and walky talkies?). Could be interrupted by: Slack, Discord, Email, Phone call, Walky Talky, In-person

• Risk-averseness

  • Would get introduced from people with less authority
    • e.g. Meia/Saul discussion on gym waiver, then Kurt was like “I’ll just write a thing”

• Housing/Check-in

  • While setup, very stressful to be flagging down Rafe in order to do housing check-ins.
    • Next time, might just specify “check-in only available from 2-5pm Fri/Sat” on Lodgify and negotiate the 1-2 special cases offline

• Orange Guy

  • Was thinking “Oli/Saul are overreacting somewhat”? But not confident on this.

Set-up

• Flexibility
  • Really awesome that we got to use the space however we liked; otoh some good defaults might have helped, just because when everything is flexible then solving the high-dimension optimization problem becomes intractable
• Equipment
  • If y’all had a list of “here’s what we have”, that would be super helpful for our own planning & purchases
• Maps
  • Not having maps & room names made planning hard
  • Would rename rooms “2E2” to “E2-2” for better batching/clarity of what goes where
    • (or ideally sth like “E2: Starshine”)
  • Slideshows are great for visuals… not so great for keeping things up to date & synced.