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 egg999 (as it was then called) meeting in London in 2011.
The rest is history.
Is this a Triple Nine Society® event?
The Triple Nine Society® (TNS) is incorporated in the United States and traditionally holds an event called ggg999 in the United States each year. While ggg999 meetings were the inspiration for egg-meetings, there are some differences. Due to these differences, and due to financial, legal, and liability issues related to a United States Corporation hosting an event in a foreign country, egg-2025 is not an official TNS event. TNS supports egg-2025 but does not own or host the event. The TNS name and logo are the property of TNS, and the egg-2025 organizers have been granted limited use of the logo and name. TNS does not profit from egg-2025 and has not charged the egg-2025 organizers for the limited grant of the logo and name. TNS assumes no financial or other liability for the actions or representations of those organizers or for the event.
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.
Important
The TNS name and logo are the property of TNS. egg-2025 is a privately organized meeting, which has been granted limited use of name and/or logo for the purposes of the meeting. The use of name and/or logo does not imply endorsement, liability or responsibility by TNS.