I went to the Wikipedia meetup in Boston on Saturday 20 July. I was already in Boston to present to Lisa Gualtieri’s health communications class, so I stayed another day and attended this.
I was riding the train there and Molly User:GorillaWarfare said hello to me. I would not have recognized her because I had not seen her since Wikimania last year and even there I hardly had time with her, but she was nice enough to remind me who she was and I remembered our discussion from last year.
At the meetup I met some others I wanted to meet – User:NuclearWarfare, the arbitrator was there. I always like talking to arbitrators. He told me that he worked at Tufts Medical School and was interested in health content, which surprised me because I never had seen him on the medicine board.
I talked with Sj briefly about the work that some of us back in Seattle and elsewhere had done in establishing a US chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
I talked with another gentleman about his research into the social networks on Wikipedia.
Other people were there who were new to the concept of a Wikipedia community. The meeting hardly had an agenda – some people talked for two hours about establishing a Wikimedia chapter in Boston, and I think the motives or context for this was not understood by at least half of the attendees. Kevin Rutherford and Sven Manguard led that discussion and while I was interested in what they had to say, organizational infrastructure talks are not inherently interesting to all people.
Pete and Richard were there from the NYC chapter. We talked about getting outstanding grants written up before Wikimania. I committed to do that and I had been putting it off for some time.
Before going to this meeting I went to the Museum of Fine Art. I wish I could spend more time there and visit it often.