[Events] iCommons Innovative Series kicks off with Jimmy Wales

Yesterday evening I had the privilege of attending the first talk in the iCommons ‘The Innovation Series’, in partnership with ITWeb and the Mail & Guardian Online, kicked off by none other than the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales himself. The Innovation Series is a series of events with influential speakers from around the world who have had a significant influence on the world of the Internet.

Let me tell you, apart from being a great speaker and innovator, Jimmy Wales is so down-to-earth, he was preparing to go out to a punk rock jol at Newtown later that evening with some of the talk attendees, instigated by Rich Mulholland of Missing Link (whose company also graciously donated its time and personnel to film the proceedings). Jimmy also agrees that the FreeBSD daemon Chuck is cool, and that Tux, the Linux penguin, is not.

MC’ed by Heather Ford, executive director of iCommons, first up to speak before Jimmy were Louis-Marc of My Digital Life and Matt Buckland, GM: New Media (that’s what his presentation had) of the M&G Online (freshly returned from conferencing in Ireland and who was very relieved that he didn’t have to speak after Jimmy). Both spoke very well, by the way, in their 10-minute allotments. Roy Blumenthal was the live onsite graphic artist giving visual commentary through digital sketching. Not that I could see much, as despite sitting towards the front, I had some tall people sitting in front of little ol’ me.

Jimmy wowed us all by letting our audience, jam-packed with media, bloggers and IT geeks, be the first worldwide to see screenshots concerning two new developments from Wikia, his for-profit organisation: an open source social network application that looked very much like Facebook, except for more stringent privacy controls, and some tantalising more information on his open source search engine project.

Since I don’t have a real camera, just my trusty Nokia 6234 which doesn’t like dim lighting, I only took one photo (which I am unable to upload at the moment - Wordpress permission issues). But everyone else seemed to have decent digicams, from little point-and-shoots to big official SLRs, and I’ve seen some of the photos appearing on Flickr and Facebook already.

For more detail:

• Matthew Buckland: Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales to create Facebook competitor? [cool pics]
• Riaan Wolmarans, editor, M&G Online (whom I sat next to): What has Jimmy Wales been up to?
• Vincent Maher: Web innovation doesn’t always need to be a tech innovation
• Nic Haralambous, SA Rocks: In the room with Jimmy Wales
• Paul Jacobson: photos on Flickr [his phone died in the middle of the presentation]

I’ll let you know when and where the Missing Link videos are available for viewing.

Update Friday, 16 November:

• Nic Haralambous: Screenshot of the Jimmy Wales “Socialpedia”
• Matt Buckland: Mashable weighs in on latest Jimmy Wales comments
• Roy Blumenthal: graphic creations on Flickr