Jimbo @ Bangalore

Jimbo and Sundar
Originally uploaded by kalyanvarma.

Having learnt that Jimbo Wales is visiting Bangalore, I'd emailed him requesting his visit to Yahoo! and a separate meeting with Indian Wikipedians. He agreed and visited Yahoo! office at M.G. Road on September 29 (Friday). I went to pick him up from Le Meridian and on our way, we were discussing mainly the differences between American, British, Indian, and other international English dialects. We reached our office by 10:30 AM. Followed by a campus tour through empty cubes (!), he spent sometime reading and replying to his emails offline. From 11 AM, there were a few meetings with interested teams and then we had our regular office lunch. Later, he gave a talk that was attended by MG Road yahoos and remotely by yahoos in other offices. The talk was interesting and Jimbo said he found the young, informed, and curious audience interesting. He gladly mentioned Yahoo!'s hosting support for Wikipedia, the biggest single donation in kind, which incidentally was proposed by me.

Later we left for a wikimeetup at Coconut Grove and had nearly three hours of chat with fellow wikipedians, some of who had come from as far as Kolkata. A writeup with links to pictures is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore1.