Australian Mega-Meetup 2014 Retrospective

21 Ruby 22 May 2014 01:59AM

Overview

The first-ever Australia-wide mega-meetup took place on the second weekend of May 2014. LW clans from Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra met in a pristine country location in NSW for a weekend of rationality, outdoors, and fine company.

The event was a hit. This post is a general retrospective, another post aimed at future organisers will provide a thorough write-up of the planning, execution and suggested improvements.

If it's great to hang out with a few friends who share your interests, values, and thought processes - then it's sheer awesome to spend a whole weekend with two dozen kindred minds. The favourite pastime at the mega-meetup was conversation. Every spare moment was spent exchanging ideas and views. We brought up a large pile of boardgames and not a single game was played - too busy talking. I consider this evidence that we need to bring more rationalists together more often.

 

Background

The Australian meetups had not had any prior contact to this event. Sydney1 and Canberra are new meetups for 2014. It was hoped that the mega-meetup would persuade the new meetups that the global LW community was worth being a part of. Melbourne has been invigorated since CFAR visited and was keen to share the spirit.

 

There is a twelve-hour drive or one-hour flight from Melbourne to Sydney. Canberra is a three hours drive from Sydney towards Melbourne. To justify travelling the distance, we made the mega-meetup a weekend retreat from Friday evening to Sunday evening.

 

A word of inspiration: it was six weeks from when we first started talking to the date of the camp. Only four weeks from idea to sold out with 25 attendees.  LW organisers are chock-a-block with extra-agenty goodness and are a delight to work with. If you run a LW meetup and have neighbouring groups, get in touch. An enthusiastic team can make grand things happen pretty fast.

 

Activities

The structure of weekend was built around practical rationality sessions. Melbourne LW has accustomed its members to running sessions and we pulled on our knowledge. Most of the  sessions were CFAR modules: alumni valued the revision and those who were new got stuck into the powerful techniques. The schedule for the mega-meetup can be seen here.

 

The campsite offered a range of outdoor activities. People voted on sailing and a high ropes course. The activities allowed attendees to bond outside of the intense rationality sessions. Other mega-meetup organisers might want to organise a fun excursions of another type.

 

We played the Credence Calibration Icebreaker Game  in the opening session. It’s a merging of the credence game with the classic icebreaker ‘tell three statements about yourself, one of them a lie’.

 

Unconference/Lightning Talks were held by campfire. While roasting marshmallows, we listened to talks on cryonics, transfinite numbers, polyamory, quantified self, anthropic reasoning, the Price equation, and quite a few more.

 

European Sticker System

We adopted the European Sticker System, adorning our name tags with little indicators about ourselves. We ran out of ‘Hugs!’ stickers and a perceptible increase in the rate of hugs did occur. Uptake of Tell Culture stickers appeared universal, although harder to see in action. People cited my tell culture sticker before providing feedback about the meetup, indicating that I might not have received it otherwise. A Crocker’s Rules sticker was included for LW completeness but was cautioned against.

 

Like the ‘Hugs” sticker, ‘Ask Me Anything’ was adopted by most. One late night conversation became a circle of people pushing the limits of what they would normally ask each other:

“What is your kink (fetishes)?” “What have you done which has made you feel really morally bad?” “Given your intelligence, I am surprised by your career choice. Can you tell me about that?” “You belong to minority group X within the group here, I’m curious how that makes you feel.”

 

What's Next

There was no discussion of whether another mega-meetup should happen: all involved assumed that obviously it would and we should just start planning now. More people, longer, more stickers. We might invite New Zealand.

 

Mega-meetups are awesome and we heartily recommend everyone have them. They don’t have to be weekend-long events, your local area meetups don’t have to be large, just bring them goddamn rationalists together.

 

Credit

An enormous amount of credit goes to the organisers who made the event happen. In the counterfactual world where any one of them was absent, this mega-meetup would not have occured. 3^^3 cheers for taryneast, DanielFilan, Elo, and Nick Winter!

 

 


 

1. Sydney existed in a previous incarnation two years ago, but started up again recently.

 

European Community Weekend 2014 retrospective

23 blob 29 April 2014 02:08PM

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.

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European Community Weekend in Berlin

37 blob 24 January 2014 05:55PM

The Berlin Meetup Group is organizing the first European community meetup. We are planning a fun weekend with a focus on bringing the LessWrong community closer together. As a treat, some participants offer rationality exercises and workshops.

If you like your local meetup we hope you will like this too. It is similar, but bigger: You will get to meet and exchange ideas with a diverse set of awesome people from all across Europe. And if you don’t have a meetup nearby or didn’t get around to participating yet, this is a great opportunity to get in touch with the rest of the community.

The community weekend will take place April 11-13, from Friday evening to Sunday early afternoon, in the Odyssee Hostel in Berlin. The cost is 70 € including accommodation and breakfast. A conference room with a projector and wifi will also be available during daytime.

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