OK, sure. Let's do that. I'm available the rest of the week. I'll also try
to find someone from my network of wikimedians to help...

Yep.

Where's the text? I can probably do it with proper credentials to the website

Sure, @LilyOfTheWest - will do it later today.

Joris wrote back!

Actually wrote to Joris Pekel, their data collaborations person, on the 14th.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/178/?action=detail&order=1359

http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2016/whc16-40com-5A-en.pdf
(annex 4,5)

In T131417#2167440, @putnik wrote:

Wikimedia RU currently has a preliminary agreement with the Russian State Library (one of the largest Russian libraries) on the export of MARC database (this is several million records). I hope that in the coming days we will settle the copyright question.

Therefore, such a script would be interesting for us.

Thanks, @eranroz! :)
Awesome stuff...

Hey @Qgil! No, there isn't a wiki page, because the audience of the meetup is non-wikimedians... we've simply invited local participants based on their registration e-mails. Currently ~10 people are attending, which is a good number (and we'll send another reminder so it's bound to come up).

+1

Don't think there's a piano in the venue (unfortunately). Good thing @Amire80 offers his piano ;)
There should be quite a few places with good acoustics over there, though...

A few more ideas that can be developed into features / tools at the hackathon with some local involvement. Most of these are rough ideas at the moment but we'd like some indication of their feasibility:

As I mentioned in our correspondence elsewhere - it might be a good idea to think of projects / challenges before the hackathon and trying to pre-assemble small groups prior to the hackathon to work on it, so they come to the hackathon prepared. I know it's not a bulletproof solution, but from my experience it sometimes helps.

but as you note, there are no magical solutions or simple answers :)

In T96826#1273099, @TFlanagan-WMF wrote:

Noting for discussion that this location would make attending difficult for many Arab and other Middle Eastern passport holders. This should be seriously considered if we want full participation from the international community. I'm not sure who would be attending from these countries (Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.) but it should be noted for the record.

This might be off topic -
We corresponded with you and Rachel (@Rfarrand) about opening a Phabricator task for our hackathon application.