# Australian Mega-Meetup 2014 Retrospective

**Overview**

The first-ever [Australia-wide mega-meetup](https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2F124381698%40N03%2Fsets%2F72157644218009638%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEuJ-JNQCnup5Qjxl-mlPIo8_-rVQ) 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. Sydney^1^ 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](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuQk4CQwYau0dG1ISUdWRFNQemtlTmdVaWFJbTNEZWc&usp=sharing) 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](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-Qk4CQwYau0WnVUSVdWSkl3RkE/edit?usp=sharing).

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](http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Flesswrong.com%2Fr%2Fdiscussion%2Flw%2Fk8u%2Fcredence_calibration_icebreaker_game%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNE9QsBU-Curf-icHAmXzsH2A3QbRw)  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](http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Flesswrong.com%2Flw%2Fk5d%2Feuropean_community_weekend_2014_retrospective%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEua7hiFpESVP4vPeUbqz8NZsILRA) [Sticker System](https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2F124381698%40N03%2F13978693430%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHWHNpxovcjLug78TK9S8tsN5pgvg), 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](/lw/jis/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](/user/taryneast/overview/), [DanielFilan](/user/DanielFilan/overview/), [Elo](/user/Elo/overview/), and Nick Winter!

  

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