Unconferences are bad for my body clock. I woke up early - on a Sunday, that too - to catch a flight to Chennai for the WikiCamp. When I reached Tidel Park (the venue), Jimmy Wales had started his talk on wikipedia, wikia. He clarified to all of us that Wikipedia was not running out of money as was reported. He'd meant that they had 4 months of money in the bank, and only if they didn't receive a cent in donations for 4 months running (which is highly unlikely) they would be in a crisis.
I met with some of the key Indian contributors to Wikipedia
I spoke in the afternoon. My slides:
Atul Chitnis spoke about how to use a wiki as a website, using http://foss.in as an example. Very cool. Until then I didn't know that foss.in was a wiki site. Some clever scripting done.
In the afternoon, I moderated a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session that was hitherto unplanned. Hey, its an unconference, so all this works. We went through multiple rounds of reorganizing sessions till we had something that was agreeable to all. While we were doing it, we were the fancy of many a photographer.
Photo courtesy: Siddhi
So, back to the BoF. We got all the guys I mentioned above plus Jimmy Wales on a panel, and shot questions at them.
Photo Courtesy: Arvind
Ashwin was liveblogging the BoF until (he and) his laptop ran out of battery. There were some guys who were doing a documentary on wikis, and they captured the whole discussion. I'll link to them as soon as I can get their info.
Moot points
More photos from Arun and Vinod. Search flickr for "wikicamp" to get the whole lot.
More coverage on this event in the Blogosphere (comment or contact me to add your link here)
Arvind
Ashwin
Prathul
Himanshu
I met with some of the key Indian contributors to Wikipedia
- Bhadani, the Grand Old Indian of Wikipedia, is No. 45 in the list of worldwide contributors. This banker from Pondicherry humbles all of us.
- Ganesh K (is ganesh a bot or a human?),
- Sundar, the guy behind the Tamil wikipedia, and an admin on Wikipedia.
- Arun R and Atul Chitnis, contributors .
I spoke in the afternoon. My slides:
Atul Chitnis spoke about how to use a wiki as a website, using http://foss.in as an example. Very cool. Until then I didn't know that foss.in was a wiki site. Some clever scripting done.
In the afternoon, I moderated a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session that was hitherto unplanned. Hey, its an unconference, so all this works. We went through multiple rounds of reorganizing sessions till we had something that was agreeable to all. While we were doing it, we were the fancy of many a photographer.
Photo courtesy: SiddhiSo, back to the BoF. We got all the guys I mentioned above plus Jimmy Wales on a panel, and shot questions at them.
Photo Courtesy: Arvind
Ashwin was liveblogging the BoF until (he and) his laptop ran out of battery. There were some guys who were doing a documentary on wikis, and they captured the whole discussion. I'll link to them as soon as I can get their info.
Moot points
- Kiruba was formally dressed (he had to, he was the organizer)
- Someone actually asked Jimmy Wales "So, when is Wikipedia going to list on NASDAQ?". Jimmy had the patience and grace to answer it. (No, I'm not going into the lengthy explanation here.)
- Atul Chitnis got pelted with squeeze balls
for exceeding his talk-timeto provide the media a "story" (read his comment below). Geeks have bad aim -- only 2 of them hit their target, and Atul is hard to miss. No wonder software projects have so many bugs.- Red Bull was one of the sponsors, so we all had wings in the afternoon
- Chennai was cooler than Bangalore that day.
More photos from Arun and Vinod. Search flickr for "wikicamp" to get the whole lot.
More coverage on this event in the Blogosphere (comment or contact me to add your link here)
Arvind
Ashwin
Prathul
Himanshu
6 comments:
been expecting this post since morning. nice summary :-)
The reason for the pelting was because CNN-IBN needed some "controversial" material to show on TV, and therefore requested Kiruba to pick a target. Since I was the next speaker, he picked me. :)
For the record, I started my talk only *after* that staged bit of pelting, and was done in 30 mins.
Soumya,
Your presentation was useful, Thanks for uploading it to slide share. Can you give the URL for the Micro Finance organization too.
Thanks,
Vimal
Atul: I stand corrected.
Vimal: Look here for details about the microfinance project that I was talking about. I plan to speak about this project in detail at the next Barcamp in Bangalore (tentative date 31 March).
Hey Soumya,
I guess I missed your seesion but I guess it was nice that you uploaded on SlideShare.
Good information in the slides.My coverage on WikiCamp is not so detailed but it would also be somewhat informative .You can check out http://thoughtsprevail.blogspot.com/2007/02/jimmy-wales-speaks-at-wikicamp.html
And did all of miss writing about Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan of CNBC-Tech2?
-Himanshu
(Contributor to http://startups.in)
(http://thoughtsprevail.blogspot.com)
Himanshu, I have linked to your blog post. Good summary of Jimmy Wales' talk.
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