The mentioned TUMuchdata requires a signed form, in German, handed over in person (not email) to join their community.
I think this is not required to just attend one of their events. The events are at the university campus which is quite off, and makes it relatively inconvenient to get there if you are not at the university anyway.
Just to clarify some stuff here (from an actual TUMuchData management team member):
The form is not really relevant for our events, it's just to support us. Since we have made the decision of being a MUNICH BASED IN PERSON club to get the maximum networking and social experience, we also wanted to make sure our actual club members will fulfill these criteria. That's why we have the paper form in person policy.
There will be some member-only events but those are more social events or maybe ones with very limited spots but usually access to events will be public.
Our events are not exclusively on the Garching campus. As you already found out we have two major formats:
1. The weekly paper reading group which is mostly researchers (mostly PhD students, sometimes professors) presenting their research or a single paper. Some weeks we have industry talks instead. These events are in Garching and only during the lecture period because they are mostly targeted towards students (we are a student club after all) so that they can learn more about the very relevant database research that is happening at TUM and how it's applied in industry.
2. Monthy or bi-monthy Munich Database Meetups which are more targeted towards industry and bringing together industry, students and researchers from academia. Those events will usually have more than one talk unlike our weekly events, the talks will mostly have speakers from industry (usually 2). They will usually be somewhere in the city center of Munich to make sure industry people will get there easier. We usually try to get some location at some company. We already had them at CodeCentric, Google and JetBrains.
For both formats we try to make sure we get deep technical talks about mostly database systems internals. For the research talks they are usually very deeply technical anyway and for the industry talks (including meetups) we are working on guidelines to make sure they know what type of talk we expect.
I work at a government facility that offers venue rentals. The rental contract states the facility name must not be used in order to avoid the scenario where someone tries to make a private event sound like it is endorsed by the government.
Oddly enough, the facility name gives the impression it is affiliated with an unrelated institution. This results in interesting conversations where one starts by dissuading grifting based upon the implied affiliation, and ends by telling them they are barking up the wrong tree when they try grifting based upon the actual affiliation.
If these people did not exist, many institutions would be far more generous with their space. That is especially true of colleges and universities, where there is often a strong desire to foster positive relationships with the community.
> The events are at the university campus which is quite off, and makes it relatively inconvenient to get there if you are not at the university anyway.
I just checked Google Maps. The uni is 2 stops on the metro or a 20 minute walk from the main train station (HBH). "[R]elatively inconvenient to get there" -- uh, no.
This is either one of the other universities or the old TUM campus. The computer science department is located in Garching and this also where many of their events are, as you can see from their events page.
But as others have pointed out they had and have many events in other locations as well. From the events page you can see that Google and JetBrains hostet them among many others.
I think this is not required to just attend one of their events. The events are at the university campus which is quite off, and makes it relatively inconvenient to get there if you are not at the university anyway.
So, I guess they found a viable filter.