2011-05-21 52 14

The big Berlin meetup 2.0, as decided on the Geohashing_Day_2011_Extravaganza page.

Location

Berlin, or somewhere else. Stay tuned.

Participants

Please add yourself. Only if you plan to be there, of course

Name	From	Arriving	Staying where	comments
Amuzulo
Aperfectring		friday 19:00 at Tegel airport	?	need to catch a plane around 13:00 from Tegel on sunday. I will have no car or other personal vehicle, so I strongly advocate transit+walking, but would also be willing to rent a bicycle if need be.
Ekorren	48,9	Friday evening by train	Need cheap accommodation. Will appreciate offers or recommendations	Refuse to go anywhere by car or other motorized individual traffic. Considering to bring my own bike. Will probably stay at least until monday.
LadyBB (+1)	50,8
Mampfred	50,8
The_T-Man	48,11
davidc	52,13
lyx	52,13	long ago	at home
mtu	53,10
relet	60,10	in time before saturday

Plans

Getting to Berlin. Or the hash. And back, possibly.

Describe your travel plans here. Maybe someone will try to intercept them spontaneously.

Ekorren

My ticket says that I have to catch a train at 22:58 from Berlin to Hamburg on friday evening, and to reach that, I can take any reasonable local train on a direct route which arrives there in time to just barely miss it and be forced to stay at Berlin instead.

This allows me to arrive not earlier than 15:42 and not later than 22:47 at Berlin Hbf, and includes the option to schedule a stopover along the way. Everything else will not be decided before thursday evening.

Aperfectring

I arrive on Friday night at Tegel around 19:00, and will want to get some food at that point, or shortly after. I fly back out from Tegel at 13:00 on sunday afternoon, so need to be at Tegel by 12:00, and preferably a bit before that.

Add your own plans

Where to go

It's been decided that Berlin will depict the general area of the hash to visit, but that does not necessarily mean that the hash to visit will be in the Berlin graticule or even within of Berlin.

Options include:

Visit the point in the Berlin graticule, whatever that may be
Visit another point in a nearby graticule, which looks nicer or better accessible
Do a multihash if a consensus is not achievable
Hijack a plane and visit the globalhash
Visit some alternative voted location which is not really a geohash.

Comments, preferences, conditions by various participants:

I would generally try to avoid alternate locations and prefer to go further out in case the closer ones are not good. I refuse to go anywhere by car. After about 150 expeditions and never using a car to get to the hash, I would really like to keep that chain going. I consider to bring my own bike, to be able to cover distances from the nearest train station which are too long to walk. --Ekorren 19:36, 9 May 2011 (EDT)

I too would strongly advocate against alternative locations, and also second Ekorren's position about cars. I won't have a bike, so also would prefer against one where that is required, but am not totally against renting one for the day. --aperfectring 01:49, 10 May 2011 (EDT)

Tickets

There are affordable daypasses for one or five people. The following is valid for weekends, further restrictions apply on weekdays. All are valid on local trains, metro, bus, and some boat lines, none are valid on fast long distance trains.

Daypass area	1 person	up to 5 people	comments
"AB", that's basically Berlin itself	6.30€	15.00€
"ABC", that's Berlin plus a bit of the surroundings, i.e. Potsdam	6.80€	15.50€
Berlin (AB) plus one straight line to some destination which must be outside of the ABC area.	varies with distance	n/a	25% discount with BahnCard
All of Berlin and Brandenburg states	20.00€	28.00€	group ticket is called Brandenburg-Berlin-Ticket
All of Germany	n/a	39.00€	Schönes-Wochenende-Ticket, outside of Berlin not valid in most buses etc.

Bike transport is 1.50 (single trip within of Berlin), 3.00 (single trip within of Berlin and Brandenburg), 4.50 (daypass for railways in all of Germany), 6.00 (daypass for Berlin and Brandenburg, including U-Bahn and ferries)

Suggested timeline

Friday around hash o'clock

15:29 - zbot summoning ritual
15:30 - announcement of coordinates
15:31 - traditional chorus of boos

Friday evening

Participants arrive at Berlin or resist the urge to leave the city if already there.
Discussions about the coordinates will go on in the IRC, on the wiki and by other means of communication including talking in person.
Consensus where to go will be reached or not.
Destination will be announced
Recommendations about how to get there will be issued or not, and possibly ignored.

Questions:

Shall we make a meeting point for people who want to meet already in the evening, to make plans together?
When and how will the decision made where to go?

Comments: I am all for having a meeting Friday evening. Someone else will have to suggest location, though, because I know absolutely nothing about Berlin. --aperfectring 01:49, 10 May 2011 (EDT)

I think we should all vote in the following manner:

Place votes in a table like this: Hashpoints/locations I am willing/able to go to, from most willing/able to least willing/able | Hashpoints/locations I cannot/refuse to go to
I suggest that every person put Berlin and the 8 surrounding graticules at the very least into their lists.
Then we attempt to remove all of the locations where people voted cannot/refuse.
- If we succeed at removing all of cannot/refuse locations, and still have more than one location up for grabs, then I suggest condorcet among the remaining locations to determine the winner.
- If we cannot accommodate everyone with one location (which I sincerely hope doesn't happen), then I suggest we split up into two (or more if needed) roughly equal sized groups and visit two (or more) different locations, then set a meeting place for all groups/geohashers.

If anyone has a better suggestion, voice it! This is just something I came up with off the top of my head. --aperfectring 01:49, 10 May 2011 (EDT)

Saturday morning

Meeting at Berlin (central station?)
Last possibility to place bets what will go terribly wrong on the way (like that the bus timetable at the bus stop says there are no buses at all although the electronic timetable claimed there were. However, such a thing never really happened before, did it?)
Setting off