I think there were too few people wearing no-touching tags to make them work (well enough). At some point I freaked out and everyone who saw me in distress and wanted to help just hugged, patted and generally invaded me - ignoring the tag and the semi-obvious reason for freaking out.
What I do not agree is what you call the ironic status of those tags. I talked to some people about it and aside from straight "I want a lot of hugs" and "don't touch me at all" there was also the opinion "I don't feel comfortable being hugged (or touched), but I can hug some of the other people" - a middle ground, which didn't have a separate tag and did not truly fit neither of the present tags. Given the generally cuddly atmosphere picking a "don't hug me" tag was the sensible action (because not picking a tag would simply put you in the majority - "hug me" group).
I don't know if having a new middle-ground tag would fix this problem. Maybe it would be ignored the same way that the "don't touch me" tag was. Maybe it simply would work better if the group was more balanced. I caught myself several times looking at somebody's tag to check if they will accept a hug and preparing my body for a hug before my brain processed the meaning of the pictogram - since almost everyone wanted hugs, this person must want them too, right?
Possibly a middle ground is not actually needed- a "do not initiate physical contact" tag could serve the purposes of both people who do not want hugs at all, and people who are okay with hugs from certain people, but do not want others to initiate. Anyone can hug someone with a "do not initiate contact" tag with permission or the other person's initiation, but nobody with such a tag is required to give either.
However, I think it's probably preferable that both hugging and non-hugging people wear tags, rather than specifying only one. ...
So finally - with two weeks distance to the first European LessWrong Community Weekend - we want to share the organizers’ perception of the event, including a short overview of what went well, what did not and what exceeded our expectations.
First and foremost we thank all the participants and speakers for helping us in making this such a great weekend. We had an incredible time and are very happy everything worked out as well as it did. In our opinion the event was a great success! Meeting everyone was excellent and we look forward to running a similar yet improved event in the future.
One of the awesome things about the event were the group dynamics. The general feeling was that the participants were open and had a generally positive attitude towards each other. Even some people who usually prefer to avoid crowds expressed that it was a safe place to try different things and to improve their social skills.
Two things that strongly supported the pervasive feeling of community and friendship were the extraordinarily high frequency of hugs and the cheerful sentiment of the LessWrong study hall people that spilled over to the Community Weekend participants.
We wanted to encourage hugging by letting people put a “accepting hugs as a form of greeting” sticker on their extended name tags. To our surprise it was adopted by a huge majority and had an immense effect on social interactions by creating an atmosphere of familiarity. One story about this (anonymously shared in the post event survey) reads:
The workshop presentations strongly engaged the audience and made us all participants. While this was a great thing in itself the downside was that the time planning for most of the speakers didn’t work out. It cost us a considerable fraction of the planned 30min breaks between talks. The lesson learned: reserve way more time for questions than usual when talking to a LW crowd and actively moderate, too.
A lot of people (including us) noticed that this way the talks took too much of the time meant for discussion and socializing. Building new connections between the LWers of Europe and strengthening existing ones was the main focus of the event. A lot of this happened in the evenings when people just went to a park to play ultimate frisbee or to climb trees and learn partner acrobatics.
The wide range of topics and and the high quality of discussions in general was amazing. One especially notable case is a socratic dialogue that emerged from one of the the group discussions on the first evening. The depth of discussion and the clear thinking we achieved was amazing. The moderator of the discussion will write a detailed post on the specifics soon.
Our estimations of the number of interested LWers were way too pessimistic. Even our 90% confidence intervals fell short of the actual number of participants signing up. While we were able to increase the size of the event beyond the planned maximum by 25% we still had to reject many applications.
Organizing this event was a great experience for us and we intend to do this again. We have learned a lot and got great feedback: The next event will be even more awesome, with more time and space for discussions and and social activities. We have already started planning and preparing the bigger and better:
+++ European LessWrong Community Weekend 2015 +++
Our hope is that this will become a regular event providing a meeting and socializing space for the LWers in Europe. Other groups around Europe already showed interest in hosting similar events so that it might be alternating between cities in the future.
Upcoming posts to look out for:
Looking forward to seeing you again
John, Tristan, Alexander, Matthias, Christian… & everyone else from the Berlin LessWrong meetup