From 2 to 4 October 2026, more than 60 participants, mentors, organisers and Wikimedia community members came together at Bloom Hotel, Medicity, Gurugram, for the graduation of Road to Wiki Cohort 2.

Road to Wiki is run by WikiClub Tech India and The Open Knowledge Initiatives (OKI) at IIIT Hyderabad. It helps students take their first steps into open-source development and contribute to Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem.

I’m the Community and Logistics Manager for the programme, which means I’d spent months coordinating everything through messages and calls. So this gathering meant a lot to me. I was finally going to meet people I only knew as names and profile pictures.

When the plan met reality

The first challenge showed up before the event had even properly begun. Several students and speakers arrived well before check-in time, and suddenly room allocation and swag distribution were tangled up.

I was juggling a lot at once, and my main worry was that nobody should feel left waiting or ignored.…