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Poll: HN Meetup in Munich - date, agenda, etc. (second try)

96 points by HSO ↗ HN
[NOTE: This is a second try. Hit it up when you see it so it gets on the frontpage and attracts participants.]

Based on the response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656646 and the suggestion by kojote (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658023), I contacted the Couch Club (http://www.couch-club.org/). I haven't been there myself yet but it is central, looks nice from the outside, plus they have a foosball table. Regular weekday hours are 2000-0100. The proprietor was open to welcoming our group an hour or two in advance if we agree to some "Mindestumsatz" (minimum consumption) as a group. She indicated 100-200 EUR but will come back with a definite number later. Their food offerings are sparse (pizza salami or vegetarian) but if we want, we can order more diverse pizze and other stuff and they'll coordinate with a partner. Internet access is not public but they will give us access if we need it for some presentation or so.

Which brings me to the next point: My own preference is that this not become too complicated. From my view, the primary goal is to meet new people with overlapping interests and let it roll from there. Talks and such, if demand and supply balance, can be organized later. Since we can have the place to ourselves for 1-2 hours, depending on what we decide, I suggest this "program":

  1) meet and order food
  2) while we wait for food, brief self-introductions
  3) while we eat, max. 1-2 people can give a short talk
  4) bar opens to the general public -> mingle/drink/foosball
Please indicate your preferred date below. If you send me an email at meetup@haija.net, I take that as indicating higher probability of attendance and your voice counts twice. If there is a sponsor among you who, just in case, can underwrite the shortfall to the minimum consumption (if any), please send me a mail too.

For suggestions and discussion, please leave a comment.

Thx.

24 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 67.0 ms ] thread
hef19898
15 Mar 2012. And nice to see HN has members from Munich!
justliving
15 Mar 2012 here as well!

In terms of suggestions: I'd be cool to see if we could make that a regular meet-up, e.g. every month.

For the first event, I'd recommend not to have any planned talks/presentation but to try it out and to see if we there'd be enough people to meet regularily.

brazzy
Glockenbachviertel? Fabulous! All 3 dates are OK for me, I'll come if at all possible.
hendrik-xdest
Great idea. I think I can make it but won't be able to support the program much. Would you reckon English as the primary language or German?

Also, it's a good idea to have someone like Nils (kojote - www.silberkind.de/+) on board because he has extensive knowledge about the organization of such events. He is active in the PHPUG, organizer of the Barcamp Muc, GTUG Muc, ... probably the best known geek from Munich.

brandon
I'm curious to see about the language as well. I'm visiting MUC next week (out from the bay area) and I wouldn't mind meeting some HNfolk, but I don't think my 5.2-word Deutsche vocabulary will cut it.
HSO
I don't think this should be a problem. After all, HN is an English-speaking community. What is usually done in such situations is, ask if there are any non-German speakers (or should that be German non-speakers?!) in the group and if yes, switch to English. Private conversations are what they are, of course.
jcblitz
I'm was in Munich on Monday and in Jena for the rest of the week coming from the Philadelphia area. In general, people speak English very well. I know a little bit of German and try to speak it as much as possible, but people pick up right away I'm not good at it and they start speaking English. I would imagine you'll have no issues at the HN meetup like someone else said, it's an English speaking community.
zeynalov
why not weekend?!
hessenwolf
Families, girlfriends (or boyfriends), skiing trips... It'd be really hard to squeeze in.

And if it is on a worknight I will still be wearing a suit and look like a total douche ;).

hef19898
don't worry! I return from a business trip the day before, so even its not a suite, its gonna be tired as hell!

And yes, week-ends are a no go! It's winter here after all! :-)

struppi
Wow, sounds great! Unfortunately I'll be at droidcon.de in Berlin, so all dates won't work for me :(
jwildeboer
Meh. Would love to join but these three days are no-go as I will be travelling on the 12th, returning the 15th. Next time!
sideshowcoder
Sounds really interesting I'll be there, Couch Club is a really nice location.
xenonite
what about one month later (again)?

-> extend the poll to include an option to postpone the meetup?

s1rech
interesting! I'll try to show up too
yitchelle
I would love to organise something like this in the Cologne/Dusseldorf area (where I live :-). Would be great to hear how the event went after the post-mortem. You could do a blog post or something similar about the experience.
HSO
Good idea!
Cass
Is this going to be programmers/engineers only? I hang out on HN because I'm interested in general tech news and like the entrepreneurial spirit of the site, and would enjoy meeting like-minded people. But I'm not a programmer myself, and if this is a meetup intended more for people who want to discuss whether Rails should ship with ActiveRecord::Base.attr_accessible(nil), enabled, I'm afraid I'm going to be rather far out of my depth.
HSO
I'm not a professional programmer either, so that makes us two already. For what it's worth, I think you should just come, and it will be what you make it to be (you know what I mean?).