Web Weekend Kathmandu 2018 Wrap Up

Web Weekend Kathmandu Group Picture 🌯 It’s been 3 weeks since Web Weekend Kathmandu and we’ve almost finished all the pending work for the conference. The event was pretty successful and beyond what we had planned and expected for.

Facts and Figures

~300 attendees in the whole event
Representatives from >55 different companies in Nepal
11 different nationalities at the conference
10% female attendees 😢
8 wwktm sponsored attendees (exluding other partial discounts)
80 people hiked
1 HUGE bag of trash collected from the trail. We like our trails clean.

The Conference

The gates opened at 8:00am and there’s already a huge queue at the registration desk. The speakers are already at the venue and working on their setup and talk for the day. Everyone’s enjoying their sandwiches and aalu fry. It’s 9:15am and Ravi dai, our MC for the day kicks off the show. Each talk was interesting and gave enough to the audience. Enough to implement, research and learn once they were back from the event. There were number of fun moments while the speakers were on stage. Some of my most memorable ones are

Denis speaking of mining coins that were worth nothing
Gaurav’s random jokes between his talk (or rathar his talk between all the funny tech jokes)
The whole audience hooting to hear Chathu’s full name
Sonika’s story full of up’s and down’s
Rob’s impeccable storytelling

Even though the internet was patchy, it was exciting to see the attendees posting a lot of fun stories and pictures on social media. The day was intense, full of insightful talks and many nice memories to go back and sleep on.

The Hike

Hike more. Worry Less. - anonymous

Lakhuri Bhanjyang It’s 6:00am, the designated time to leave for the hike and guess what, our venue is not open yet !! Damn, Guard Dai !!! Finally, the venue opens up, we fill our bottles, get an initial briefing about the hike, get into our Sajha bus and off we go.

We reach Lakhuri Bhanjyang and Kailash from artudio gives an amazing introduction to art. He explains how you can do art with anything and it likes in the eyes of the maker. We then divide into groups based on our tshirt color - AMAZING IDEA!!. The whole hike we used materials from nature to build small art pieces. It was the best exercise to get to know other people from our groups.

The main motive of the hike was for the attendees, speakers and organizers to mingle more and get to network at a more deeper level. I think that’s what exactly happened as I got to talk to so many people and know what they were doing, get an understanding of their point of view and have deeper conversations about tech, life, community and nature.

Hike Group Picture

Other Activites

Apart from the main conference and hike, some of the speakers and attendees took the opportunity to do other activities. Some of the highlights are:

Trek to Langtang Region
Trek to Everest Base Camp
Speakers Dinner
Post conference Dinners and Meetups (coordinated via Slack)

Event Coverage

Photos and Slides on the website
Event Talks Videos - Coming Soon
Do Not Merge Podcast on Web Weekend Kathmandu - SoundCloud

wwktm.next

There will definitely be a next wwktm. In what capacity, design, format? That is a thought for another blog post.

Until then,
Be nice to everyone :D