How it started
Back in 2008/9, Ed Schreiber (then Membership Officer of the Triple Nine Society (TNS) and organizer of regular local meetings in Denver CO) announced that he was planning for a larger meeting for TNS members. All this was unofficial, simply someone making a (huge) effort, and the meeting that took place in late 2009 was a tremendous success.
More meetings followed, and after the 2010 meeting, a European participant (Andrew Aus, an ISPE member) asked whether there was something similar in Europe. As Thorsten Heitzmann (then Editor of the TNS journal) had expressed a wish to one day participate at a ggg999 or host a meeting on the other side of the pond, Andrew was directed to Thorsten and together they hosted the first egg (as it was then called) meeting in London in 2011.
The rest is history.
Official vs. unofficial - I
ggg999-meetings were always very different from egg999-meetings. And one major factor is that at ggg999 there is usually a meeting hotel, where the meeting takes place and where most participants stay. In order to get all this at an affordable rate, the organizer of the meeting usually must guarantee to the hotel a certain number of paid nights - if you think of, say, 80 nights at $100 each you will arrive at $8,000 which the organizer has to stand for. This is a considerable financial risk, that not many members can bear or want to bear, even if they are eager to volunteer to host the meeting. So as a result, in 2014 the ggg999 meetings became "official", which means that TNS signs the contract and it's TNS' money that is at stake.
For the European meetings, things are quite different. Substantial hotel discounts are hard to get, and with good public transport in most places, people tend to organize their overnight accommodation themselves. This means that while there is some financial risk to the organizer, that risk is pretty small and can be adjusted along the registration period - the huge expense for pre-booked rooms not being necessary.
So despite this being discussed regularly, egg999 never became "official". It had evolved into "Thorsten's private meeting" and that was that.
Official vs. unofficial - II
At one point TNS' Legal Counsel pointed out, though, that if the meeting uses the TNS name and logo, the meeting would legally be likely considered official - even if it's not declared as such. Even more so as TNS owned the "egg999" name, having accepted a donation by Andrew Aus several years back. So to accept the inevitable, the meeting was recognized as "official".
But things are never easy, and questions around liability and privacy arose, leading to a U-turn. TNS handed the meeting (and the name) to Thorsten, making it clear that egg is not linked to TNS - one unfortunate result being that egg cannot use the TNS logo any more, and neither can it use the three nines. But of course nothing has changed otherwise, the meeting is still open to all TNS members, following the rules for participation that Thorsten wrote years ago.
And we might be seeing another U-turn (Or a "half U-turn", but what is that? An "I-turn"…?) - not really back to where we were, but it might be an option for TNS to allow its members limited use of its intellectual property, so maybe this is the way to go.
Thorsten Heitzmann
Together with my wife and children I live in Switzerland. I had joined Swiss Mensa in 2004 and found the membership generally unrewarding - I left, joined German Mensa, left there, went back to Swiss Mensa and finally left for good.
I had joined TNS in 2005 and felt that this was the place for me. I volunteered as member of the board in various functions (being Editor of the journal for 8 years) and from 2020 to 2024 I was Regent (President) of TNS.
One of my pet peeves is the strange focus of the general society on gifted children - which to me often makes it seem as if gifted adults or gifted seniors are non-existent or not worth wasting a thought on. This is a pity, as gifted people (just like everyone else) are not less interesting or less important as adults than they were as children. Granted, one needs to be a child to be a child prodigy, but there's more to being gifted than playing Rachmaninoff at age 5.
In general I am not very much into high IQ science and neither am I very interested in endless discussions on what it means to be gifted, nor in the endless suggestions of how things could be improved for gifted people. However, I welcome when people shine a light onto the inadequately represented aspects of giftedness.
To that end I welcome the work of the Dutch Institute for Giftedness in Adults and I also agreed to be one of three protagonists in a television report on the everyday life of gifted people (German only, though it's also on YouTube seperated by protagonists, and the auto-translation of the subtitles is reasonably ok.
You ask about another pet peeve? There you go:
In the education of gifted children, people often talk about enrichment (essentially enriching the curriculum with more in-depth exploration or the addition of different topics) or acceleration (essentially "jumping classes" or going through the curriculum at a faster pace). And all that is well and good.
However, from my experience with organising these meetings, it seems to me that one of the most important aspects is being overlooked - or at least not appreciated enough. What gifted people need is a peer group of other gifted people to talk about banal issues, mundane everyday stuff. Often I get asked what we talk about at an egg meeting - the expectation being that we're talking about quantum physics and saving the world - when essentially we're being normal, just different.
And it is that setting - where high-giftedness is a normal thing - which I think is needed, and which is quite often not properly provided.