Reached the venue Tidel Park at around 9:30 AM and was good to see so many techie guys around in one room.There was Jimmy Wales,the founder of the Wikipedia talking about WiKi and its journey.Some of the interesting during this entire session with Jimmy Wales which lasted around 1.5 Hours is below:
a. WiKi and Search Transparency:The question is what the traditional search engine companies take some good stuff from the Wiki?.As per Jimmy,this is not a potential danger.Security through obscurity is a bad idea!!Hence,there is no danger in making the search open to the entire world.During the course of the same question,Jimmy revealed some facts of the Wikipedia foundation:
1. 10% of the money goes to the growth of the WikiMedia foundation.2. There are only 31 employees working full time for Wikipedia.
b. What about the funding model of WikiPedia?
Donations come from the general public and this is where the major funding comes for Wikipedia and money comes from all over the world.There was recently a false news that the WikiPedia foundation had a fund problem and this is where Jimmy completely denied the news.
c. So where does Wikipedia get the revenues from?
The entire revenue comes from advertising and it is only through Google Ads
d. Why do you so less on your wordpress blog?
Jimmy Wales blogs here. Jimmy is very much afraid of the press and said that “What if he misses a comma in a sentence,than he has to wait 2-3 days with the press”
e. Business Model in the Open Source World:
Firefox is an excellent example of an open source browser.It gets around 100m$ every year.Also,I(Himanshu) was surprised to know that “Every Google search in the Firefox leads to some amount of donation to the FireFox(Mozilla Foundation)
f. How about donating of computer resources to the Wikipedia foundation?
1. Latency problems may arise in case of Peer to Peer networks.
2. User privacy would be a problem.For Wiki Foundation,the bandwidth would cost around 25000$/month.Jimmy found very difficult to reveal that “There is a major internet company in the US that has already offered to host Wikipedia for free but the Wikipedia foundation has not accepted the offer.
g. What about using Wikipedia as a source of delieverables in our day to day business?
The hierarchy business is all nonsense.I don’t believe in it.Instead,grass roots communication can help a company grow better.BestBuy is an excellent retailer in the US.It is a company that follows the grass roots communications rule.In BestBuy,some guys install stereos since it is their job and some install them since they are all stereo geeks. 
It has been almost two days since the Wiki fever is over and I have been waiting and waiting for the slides to be uploaded on SlideShare.Finally,I was able to find Soumya’s session on “How ways Wiki changed the way I work-A true story”.I missed this informative session but finally got it on SlideShare
