Hi all,
I am posting a detailed summary of the Bangalore celebrations, apologies for making it long to read, but hey it was 12 hours of celebration!
It was a great start to the day with overwhelming response to see 10 volunteers 8 am at the venue willing to help and with that, the number of people coming in very slowly but steadily increasing. Around 9:30 AM we began the days proceedings at Lecture hall with Arunram welcoming the people with an Introduction of the event and we had informal round of introductions of people who were there(50 already!). We then had different Indic language wiki communities presenting reports with Bellayat joining over Skype from Dhaka being the first to provide an update on Bengali Wikipedia. Arjuna followed it with Telugu Wikipedia update.HP Nadig followed with update on Kannada Wikipedia. Sundar followed it with Tamil Wikipedia report and audience were very receptive so much that we needed to cut short the Q&A for time constraints.Kiran Gopi provided the Malayalam Wikipedia report followed by myself giving an update of WP:INDIA Project of English Wikipedia.We also had a small discussion on Five pillars,policies etc. We broke for tea around 11:30 AM and the crowd was 75 by then. Arunram continued with Sanskrit Wikipedia report and then there was an open discussion on way forward,future which was lively. The final number of people who attended morning session was close to around 100 people. Each language report contained information on stats, community, challanges, outreach activities and way forward.
Just before breaking for lunch we took this picture http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-10-celebrations-Bangalore-2011.... showing ten as theme.
We regrouped for Segment 2(Special Interest groups) around 2:15 PM and Arjuna quickly gave the format of the event.(Collaboration with Special Interest Groups). There was a Birds track lead by Shyamal and the bird watching community in Bangalore. The photography track was handled by HP Nadig covering commons. The technology track had myself presenting overview of technology / hacks possible with Wikipedia and then Kiran providing a hands on demo on mwclient and wiki-analysis project. Sundar joined in to give a brief session on Bots and pywikipediabot framework. The different language groups had discussions at the foyer area with Arjuna leading Telugu, Shiju / Kiran leading Malayalam, Sundar leading Tamil and HP Nadig leading Kannada Wikipedias respectively. The number of people who attended Segment 2 was around 150 people.
We broke for a tea around 4:30 PM and regrouped ourselves at the main auditorium around 5:20 when we had a sudden change in the agenda after Jimmy wanted to have the Skype call earlier. It helped us in a better way with Jimmy addressing the audience and kickstarting the Segment 3 around 5:40 PM. Thanks a lot Jimmy :) . We then had Manish explained about how Wikipedia works, community, Foundation, Statistics, India specific stats and gave an overall Introductory talk on Wikipedia to the larger audience(Around 200 . We then played some videos from the WikimediaFoundation youtube channel with editors sharing their experiences. HP Nadig then formally announced the formation of the Chapter and did an interactive Session ''Namma Wikipedia'' with audience on How they used Wikipedia. Around 6:30 PM there was a talk by Lawrence Liang. We had a small break and at 7:10 PM Sundar anchored the audience session on "How I became a Wikipedian" with editors sharing their stories on how they became Wikipedians. Then we had a very interactive panel discussion with renowned people like Prof.Sadagopan - Founder Director IIIT-B, Writer Madanmohan Rao, Achal Prabhala - Wikimedia foundation advisory and Sunil Abraham - Executive Director Centre for Internet and Society, speaking on Wikipedia and its role moderated by Arunram. We called it a day by 8:15 PM and it was quite a day! [PS: I couldnt update evening session in detail since i was doing some running around]
230+ people attending the event on a festive day(Sankaranti) was quite an accomplishment and shows the amount of love people have for Wikipedia :). I would like to thank each one of them for making this event a success.
I would like to thank Jimmy, Lawrence Liang and the panelists for making it to the event with their busy schedules.
On behalf of Bangalore Wikipedians, I would like to thank our sponsors, National Institute of Advanced Sciences (NIAS) for providing an absolutely wonderful venue for the event free of cost, Microsoft Research India for sponsoring food,refreshments, Discovery India for sponsoring the publicity materials, Centre for Internet & Society for providing Wifi,sponsoring Videography at the event in a very short notice, being always there for Wikipedian community in Bangalore. [Yes most of the event is recorded and would be up on commons in a few days!] and Wikimedia Foundation for all those tees and nice goodies :)
Last but the least the volunteers without which the day wouldnt have been what it was. Abu,Anoop,Arjuna Rao Chawla, Arunram, Arunganesh, Gautham, Harsha,HP Nadig, Kiran Gopi, Kiran Jonnalagadda, Manish, Melvin, Philip Tiju, Sundar, Suma, Srikanta, Sathyamurthy, Swaroop Rao, Tinucherian, Vishal Gayakvad, Vimal, Srinivas Gunta, Royson[CIS],Sunil,Ramesh[NIAS],Sashidharan[NIAS]. Sincere apologies if i had missed anyone on the list.
Since i didnt have camera, there are no pictures from me, expect them from others soon on commons :)
Let this be a new larger wave of community in Bangalore and hope our monthly meetup participation increases folds and more importantly more people join the movement and "edit the world".
Regards Srikanth.L (User:Logicwiki)
PS : This also happened to be my farewell wiki-meetup at Bangalore since am relocating, will miss Bangalore meetups :( :(