(Originally written up as a blog post)
Last Thursday night there was a public meeting (in person and on
IRC) @ Berkman to let people in the area know what the conference might
be like. It was held at Berkman, hosted by the Thurs. night blog group
(already a Berkman satellite run by the local community).
20 people came; every one taking two hours out of their night to think
and talk about wikis and Wikimania. About a third were affiliated
with Harvard; there were people from Wellesley, MIT; a teacher from
BU; three librarians; a few local hackers and old LiveJournal
community moderators. There was a joyful energy in the air.
The audience included developers who use MediaWiki regularly; teachers
who use wikis in their course and project designs; and enthusiastic
editors and users. Most had not been involved with the earlier
planning for the bid; this was a very introductory presentation.
I skimmed over the [[m:wikimania 2006]] pages, and filled in a few
details about what things were like last year. There was some
discussion about what local groups could do to help make it a better
conference. A few Wikimedians took part via IRC (which was cool) but
there wasn't much IRC conversation. A repeated question was how to
get Wikimedians around the world more involved; which prehaps will be
discussed more this week.
++ SJ