Some photos. The album is available only through this link and I will of course remove any photos that you feel are not showing your faces in good (enough) light.
It's a pity so few people took any photos at all.
As for my thoughts. I was surprised by myself. I have a huge personal space, so I feel invaded pretty much all the time (only my kids have unlimited hugs with me, even tkadlubo doesn't). And here, maybe partly because of the tags system, I almost never felt invaded. I did feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of people around me, but I could cope surprisingly well (by my own standards).
I think next time we could expand the 5-10min speeches part. For me it was the best part of all of the workshops, because all the people who did talk, talked briefly and engagingly about what recently is interesting to them. I also think we should make all the workshops more explicitly voluntary. Everybody attended (which is great), but the few people who chose to omit one or two were left without anybody to talk to. This is one of my insights from comparing this meeting with Polish Mensa Annual Gathering (I told Christian about the others, but if required, I will write them down here, too). PMAG is much larger and has an ample schedule of lectures, workshops and contest, but at all times many people are just hanging around talking to others.
I think next time we could expand the 5-10min speeches part.
There were slots for 10 five minutes speeches planned but not enough people volunteering fro speeches. That's why some speeches then expanded to take 10 minutes.
It's a pity so few people took any photos at all.
As far as photos goes I think there was at least one person who made a decision not to be on the final group photo. The person probably also wouldn't want to have been on photos done by individuals.
The formal legal default in Germany is that it's not allowed to make photos of people...
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.