[Wikimediaindia-l] Bangalore Wikipedia 10th Anniversary Celebrations -- Summary

[Gautam John]

Wow, Srikanth! Thank you for the awesome write up!

Much fun was had and I have to say, Srikanth did a lot of the heavy
lifting on this event. Thank you, Srikanth.

Where are you going to? Bangalore will miss you! :(

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam
________
http://social.prathambooks.org/




On 16 January 2011 00:33, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.JPG
> with 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 :( :(
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
> Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>
>