Celebrating 5 Years of KAUST

I wrote a bit about the 5 year anniversary a few weeks ago. Now that the main celebrations have passed, I wanted to follow-up and take a moment to share a few of the highlights.

The 5-Year Anniversary Photo

The most impactful commemoration in my opinion was a group of people self-organizing to take a 5-year photo at our main monument, the Beacon. Note the little, bitty people making up the “5 Years” in the photo below:

Photo used with permission from Luca Passone

This wasn’t quite as big an event for many people as the festival that was planned for months (which I discuss below), but what it demonstrated to me was community pride, a real-world appreciation for and application of technology, and community members coming together to co-create something special.

A small group of dedicated community members worked together to plan the event, set the “stage”, solicit volunteers, get the mini helicopter with camera working for the event, and create a really wonderful video from the footage. I imagine this was a tremendous amount of work – and I’m blown away by the outcome.

Here is the video they produced:

KAUST 5 year tribute from Luca Passone on Vimeo. Video shared with Luca’s permission and under creative commons license.

If you’re interested, you can read the full write-up of the work from the organizers. And, WELL DONE to the organizers and participants of this impressive project!

The 5-Year Festival

A big, community-wide event was also planned to invite the entire community to celebrate the 5-year anniversary. Working in the President’s Office on a separate project, I have been listening to the planning and organizing for about 3 months and was getting tremendously excited for the festival! It did not disappoint!

It had a county-fair-meets-circus feel to it, with people on stilts, games for all ages with prizes, food from vendors in Jeddah, and lots of performances from abroad like a fire show and magicians, as well as community-artists. There was even a huge 3D light show over the harbor. It was really quite impressive.

Here are a few photos that were shared with me from the event: