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Announcing WikiCamp – India’s First Unconference on Wikis

The event will take place at Tidel Park, Chennai on Feb 25th. Yup, in another three weeks time.

The main crux of the event is in harnessing the wisom of crowds about the power of wikis and collective collaboration. Wiki is an extremely powerful tool but highly under-utilized and worse,less understood.

This event aims to bring the best minds in technology to come share their knowledge on Wikis. This is an unconference… this means even you can come present and share your learnings. The focus is clearly on learning and knowledge sharing.

A quick note about an unconference. There is no passive audience. Every one is a participant. This means that you will have to speak or help with organizing the event or live blog, photo blog or video blog the event. This is OUR event and everyone chips in.

If you are game, do add your name to the wiki participants list. We have limited seats and with our experience with other unconferences earlier, they tend to fill up very fast. To help meet the expenses of venue, lunch and other logistics, everyone chips in with a door donation of Rs.200.

So, how did the idea for a WikiCamp come about?

Well, the seeds were sown in August 2006 when a bunch of us had a meeting with Jimmy Wales in Bangalore. You can read my account here. During the meet, I told Jimbo (that’s how he is affectionately called) of the fantastic unconference events we have had in India and how the tech community is very active. We bounced an idea of having a wikicamp and Jimbo immediately latched on to it. He said that he’d definitely be interested in attending and sure enough, he has kept his word. He will be attending WikiCamp. That’s like having Infosys’ Narayanmurthy at an entrepreneurship conference.

Who is organizing this event? Well, everyone is. Unconference, remember?! However, there’s always the core group that makes it happen. And that group is The Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit group that has passionate and enthusistic folks who earlier helped organize BarCamp Chennai, BlogCamp and Proto.in.

If you are interested, please add yourself to this wiki http://wikicampindia.pbwiki.com .

Here’s more photos of the Wikipedian meet with Jimmy Wales. Ram Krsna’s photos and Kalyan Varma’s photos.

Update: The blogosphere is already abuzz. Read Vijay Anand’s and Ravi’s blog.