Founding the Munich Datageeks e.V.
Munich Datageeks e.V. was found at the 12th of May 2015 by 15 Datageeks.
The club has been officially registered at the "Amtsgericht München" on the 5th of August 2015.
After Florian and Miguel left Munich, Torsten was on his own to organize the Munich Datageeks Meetups. As he didn't want to monetize the meetup and we always claimed that we are from the community to the community, Torsten wanted to enable everybody to be part of the organizing team. Thus, in a very German way, he started the procedure of founding a non-profit club.
And this is quite a funny story!
After several mails and communication with the fiscal authorities, Torsten wrote an E-Mail invitation to all 1000+ Datageeks Meetup group members. He expected about 10-20 people to be interested in the foundation meeting and thus he booked several tables in a Munich restaurant. Torsten was there about 15 Minutes early, chatting with the waitress and hoping for a lot of supporters to come. At the official start, nobody was there, 5 Minutes later, still nobody! Torsten started getting nervous, and the waitress started getting angry.
Another 5 minutes later, Chris appeared, obviously confused that Torsten was sitting there on his own. After calling some friends of the meetup group, Torsten slowly recognized that the invitation mail has never left his mail account!
After speaking with the restaurant manager, who was somehow enraged by defrosting about 20 Schnitzels, Torsten and Chris ordered some food, had some bear and a great chat.
Next try has been made and the mail finally found its recipients, but we had to find another location this time.
Our cornerstone:
The Munich Datageeks Meetup
The Munich Datageeks meetup was founded on May 26, 2013 by Florian Hartl and Miguel Cabrera. Since Florian moved to US in 2014, Torsten Schön took over his place. In 2015 Miguel moved to Berlin and Torsten had to take over on his own. Miguel and Florian established all what the Munich Datageeks are about today, thanks a lot guys!
Miguel (retired)
Torsten
Florian (retired)
The manifesto:
Before creating the meetup, the founders met an created a small "manifesto" outlining the ideas behind the group:
(Almost) A Monthly Meetup:
We want to have one meeting every 4-6 weeks maximum. It is not a hard limit but we don't want to have a lot of time between meetings. We want a engaged community and a continuous exchange of ideas.
Networking is important
We don't want people to come and listen to talks like zombies. We actually want people interested in similar or related fields know each other. For that reason we will have time for networking at the beginning, between talks and at the end. The sponsor will provide Bier and food to loosen up the people and spark friendly conversations.
Not to product pitches
We like talks that mix concepts with practical application. However, we don't want to be a venue for closed / paid products or companies. We know sometimes people work in specific environments that are not open (e.g. matlab) however, we think if the concepts are more important that the tool itself then there is no problem, but if the talk is centered on a specific tool, then the tool should be free / open source / available.
Research and Industry
We want to get into the same room software developers / data scientist with researchers. We believe that were people working in the industry (or "real life") can meet researchers. Both sides can benefit from it. Researcher might see what are the current problems that the industry faces and developers can see fresh results or current research trends.
Talks are held in English
Although we are in Germany and German is the official language, there are plenty of people which are not (yet) fluent enough in it. In addition to this, we want to include recently landed M.Sc. / PhD / Post Docs and developers / data scientists that not necessarily speak German.
From the community to the community
The idea of the meetings is to share knowledge from within the community in Munich. So we encourage people and attendants to present. We do invite people we know that work on the subjects and we think are interesting, some of them don't necessarily live in Munich; but we prefer and love to receive talk proposal from the same people that attend the events.
We plan to organize one meetup per month, where 2-3 talks are given from the community to the community.
All our meetups are free of charge. Venue, food and refreshments are provided by sponsors!