Pug’s Place

Six months of work on the part of a club I’m fairly involved in, Florida Free Culture, paid off last night. We sponsored Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, to come and speak at the University of Florida about Free Culture and Universities. The event was an absolute success: the 300-seat ballroom had standing room only. (I’m not sure where The Alligator got their “audience of about 500″ line in their article, but that’s far too high…)

To get Jimbo here we had six months of planning, fund-raising, advertising and periodic madness. At the end of things the event was co-sponsored by our Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Accent (UF’s cultural speakers group) and Student Government. It wasn’t easy: a core group of 8 of us managed pretty much every step of the way.

One of the local newspapers, The Alligator, misprinted the start time of the event so thus we had to open doors a full hour early of the event (instead of just 30 minutes). As you can see from these photographs, we had people there 45 minutes and even an hour before Jimbo was to speak. And those who came so early stayed, that was the most amazing part. Jimbo arrived and made his speech about Wikipedia and Free Culture at 7:30. Afterward there was a panel discussion centered around similar topics: Wikipedia article writing as a teaching tool, Open Access to scientific journals, Free Software and University IT and finally Equal Access to Essential Medicines in Low/Middle Income countries.

We had more than 40 people stay all the way through the whole panel (even though it ran late). Plenty of good questions were asked of both the panel and specifically of Jimbo. Oh, and we should have a complete audio and video recording of the whole event, so expect that on-line in a few days. Afterward came pictures, informal conversation and Jimbo signing E.’s Wikipedia shirt. She’s still ecstatic about that.
According to E., the staff of our venue were pissed about the event running late, but they were courteous to us nonetheless. And also as E. suspected, after the event I went out with three of our panelists, some of Florida Free Culture and a few other folks to The Swamp to have dinner and chat until midnight-thirty (For note, the new Monte Carlo Wrap is rather excellent).

Ah, success is good.