Notes on day 1 of my first Wikimania

Collected bullet points from day 1 of my first Wikimania:

• Hong Kong is intense. I am used to, and like, big cities, but HK feels like a scale different even from, say, Cairo, New York, Delhi, or Bangalore. Had great fun last night walking around with a few friends, ended up at Temple Spice Crab (which was amazing in a vast number of ways) and along the waterfront.
• Doing surprisingly well with jet lag, so far. We will see. (Late update: crashed pretty hard last night.)
• This is such deja vu from GUADEC, in terms of watching reunions, seeing organization (or occasional lack thereof ;) seeing people just joyful to be in each other’s presence and working on shared practices/goals. I look forward to seeing more of the differences as the conference progresses.
• First difference may be that there are a lot of structural committee meetings; not just board, but also AffCom, WCA, etc. Different from more specifically developer-oriented conferences. (I am mostly going to focus on the hacker days myself, but will also crash parts of WCA and others.)
• Khmer wikipedia is represented in the meeting I am in as I write this. Khmer is not a terribly small language (16M) but I am still heartened to see it here.
• First mention of merchandising came more than an hour into the WCA meeting. Not drawing any conclusions, just really the first legal thing. (Later they came thick and fast- so many interesting questions; some I could answer, some I couldn’t.)
• Met another engineer-turned-lawyer, who appears to have (wisely) kept his engineering career viable while doing law school. Slightly jealous ;)
• Need more stickers! Got wikidata on my tablet, at least.
• Lots of fun meeting new people.
• The map embedded here is amazing, showing not just geodata but historical change over time. Shame we’re not yet technically ready to make them more wide-spread.