Last Saturday, Maryana Pinchuk and I had the pleasure of hosting the first San Francisco meetup of Wikimedians in 2012. The Wikimedia community hosts meetups for Wikipedians and editors of our other projects all around the world. Thankfully these self-organized meetups are usually regular enough that they don’t require a blog post to herald their occurrence. But considering the rarity of a bonafide San Francisco meetup that includes community members, the Board of Trustees, and staff, we’d like to share a short recap of the event:
- We had a fantastic turnout! With about 40 attendees, Saturday was one of the largest San Francisco meetups ever, other than the 10th Anniversary’s “West Coast WikiCon” and our recent San Francisco Hackathon. (We’d particularly like to thank Wikimedia Foundation Community Department colleagues Karyn Gladstone, Siko Bouterse, and Bryony Jones for their organizational help!)
- Many of the attendees were community members (about 20 folks), but we also included the Board of Trustees and several staff from the Tech and Community Departments.
- We were thrilled to have not just English Wikipedians, but editors of Wiktionary, Wikisource, as well as Portuguese and German Wikipedia. The San Francisco Bay Area is known for having a diverse community with a huge range of interests, so we hope future meetups can continue to include people from many Wikimedia projects.
Though the Northern California community, including the Wikimedia Foundation, has periodically held great large-scale events, such as conferences and hackathons, the success of Saturday’s meetup encourages us to hold more regular, open-format meetups in the near future. Let us know if you’d like to get involved!
Steven Walling
Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation
(Photos from Wikimedia Commons)
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