The European Community Weekend in Berlin is over and was a full sucess.
This is no report of the event but a place where you can e.g. comment on the event, link to photos or what else you want to share.
I'm not the organizer of the Meetup but I have been there and for me it was a great event. Meeting many energetic, compassionate and in general awesome, people. Great presentations and workshops. And a very awesome positive athmosphere.
Cheers to all participants!
Gunnar
PS. I get it that there will be an upload of the presentations by the organizers and maybe some report of the results some time later. Those may or may not be linked from this post.
Thanks to everyone (and particularly the organizers) for a fantastic weekend!
Strongest sign of this being a good event: usually I feel drained after a social event, and by the end of the official program I was feeling that, but by the time I got home I was suddenly feeling social and energetic again. Did you people slip something into my drink to make me an extrovert?
(Okay, a lot of it was probably due to the book on charisma that I read just before the meetup and which gave me loads of confidence and useful techniques for getting into the right mindset for being social. But you all being so awesome made them much easier to use! So there. <3)
Some comments of what could've been better:
This isn't to say that the lectures/workshops weren't interesting! The "supercharging your learning" and mnemonics one in particular felt like they might be valuable in the future. But regardless, I think I'd have preferred a stronger focus on social activities. One of the parts about the meetup that I found the most enjoyable was the "Socratic Dialogue" that I ran into on accident, when people engaged in it had taken over my room on Friday. I was a little disappointed that the official program didn't include anything like that.
Suggestions for improvement: favor social activities for the programmed content, at the expense of lecture/workshop-type content. Try to set up such a set of activities that everyone ends up getting introduced and everyone talks with everyone: as it was, there were some people who I simply never got a good chance to talk with. (Maybe the introductory lunch on Friday had more of this kind of thing? Too bad we Finns missed it. :( )
Suggestions for improvement: enforce a 25-minute limit on how long someone is allowed to lecture before they are required to either end their talk, or somehow engage their audience with e.g. workshop-style activities.
Suggestions for improvement: try to schedule meditation exercises to a time when people are likely to be well-rested. (This may admittedly be an impossible task, but at least try to have them at a time when people are relatively well-rested.)
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One last thing: subjectively at least I felt like I got my social skills to a much better level than on some previous occasions. But I was also mentally drained at times and couldn't always keep it up, plus there were moments when I caught myself doing what felt like mistakes, like looking away from someone too fast or not saying hi when I had the chance, etc. So general feedback of how my social skills came across, by anyone who spoke or otherwise interacted with me, would be appreciated. Here's my anonymous feedback form that you can use for this, though of course it may be difficult to stay truly anonymous: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z2he5Tziy7OuVCGbtD2VHrI4U014sm-DRsLFw-A9dH4/viewform .
Quite alike with me. I made an effort to get to know as many as possible of you on the event and it also didn't exhaust me. And I was surprised to be able to relate to everyone, even those I didn't feel congenial to or would normally have avoid to approach. Everybod... (read more)