European Community Weekend in Berlin Impressions Thread

Gunnar_Zarncke

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.

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.

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.

I, too, have an anonymous feedback form: http://www.admonymous.com/philh . I didn't wear a Crocker's Rules tag on the weekend, but you may assume that I'm wearing one now.

I had a great weekend! I want a plushie now. (When I got home I searched for Cthulhu plushies on Amazon, but they were expensive enough not to be impulse buys, so I don't have one yet.)

It was great to meet everyone, very well done to the organisers. And I liked how most of the speakers included some kind of exercise.

The primary criticism I have is that many of the talks got derailed several times by people asking low-value questions that could have waited until afterwards, and then following up on the speaker's reply. After getting sufficiently annoyed, I arrested two of those discussions on the sunday, but I wish I'd been more proactive about it. (Many of these questions felt uncharitable, like "what you just said seems unlikely to me, and I'd like you to back it up" instead of assuming that the speaker probably knows what they're talking about.) This contributed to almost all of the speakers overrunning.

Suggestions to help with this (though after writing them, I'm realising that "google for advice about this from people who know what they're talking about" would have been a good idea):

Ask participants not to ask low-value questions; a rule of thumb might be "if you didn't understand something, go ahead and ask; if you'd like to know more, wait until afterwards".
Assume that participants will ask low-value questions anyway, and tell the speakers to be ruthless in cutting off these discussions. Organizers should also cut them off.
Assume that these discussions won't get cut out completely anyway, and advise the speakers to plan for, I dunno, 10% of their talk to be lost to them? If the talk is too short, Q&A or socializing afterwards are not bad things.

Along with others, I would have liked more social activities.

I also didn't realize before the weekend that most meals weren't included. It wasn't a big deal, but I would have brought more money with me if I'd known.

Once again, though: it was a great event! Big thank you to the organisers, speakers, and everyone who came.

I think having a lot of people act as agents works well. If you were the person who asked for tabling of some of the mnemonics discussions I comment that point.

People should be able to ask high value question and at the same time people should be able to ask for discussing that don't seem high value to be tabled.

I think there were various times in the event where people who hadn't formal authority just took responsibility to get stuff done to make the event better.

I think it would be wise to make a general call for people to take responsibility for things happening at the beginning of the event.

4Stefan_Schubert12y

First, I would also like to thank the organisers for a well-run and diverse workshop. The quality of the talks was generally high as was the level of the discussion. Phil/ With all due respect, I don't agree with the above. You always get the odd question that would have been better left unasked at any talk, but generally speaking I don't think there were too many questions (though it could be argued that some of them should have been deferred to the Q&A.) In my opinion more time should have been allocated to questions and discussions. [...] If the speaker doesn't give sufficient reasons for their claims, then one should point that out, in my opinion. Critical discussion is a central part of rationalism. On the other hand, one shouldn't be nit-picky either, and exactly where the line goes is often hard to tell. I certainly think, though, that the points I made in this regard were sufficiently important to raise during the talk in question, rather than after it (or not at all). I realise I might be in the minority on this point but these are nevertheless my views.

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European Community Weekend in Berlin Impressions Thread

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European Community Weekend in Berlin Impressions Thread

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