“Create your media and mess it up” is the best advice that any novice organiser can get. Owns: Igor Skotskin
This article aimed to help beginner organisers, future or present Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) Leads with understanding — it’s OK to mess up a little or not a little. If you haven’t heard about GDSC yet, please, check this opportunity. Maybe you will be the first to start a chapter on your campus.
Motivation
So, more context, right? 2 years ago, I was at the start of my Google Developer Student Clubs leadership journey and desperate for advice on how to run a club. I found one that keeps me on the rails, even when all goes wrong.
You may ask why should I “mess it up”? But the right question is “when will you”. And it’s OK. We are all only students here, and managing, or OMG, creating the community is more than challenging.
The point is that only in our minds are projects translated into life easily, deadlines not burned as hell, and unicorns are everywhere. Reality brings chaos into any plan, and we should deal with it.
How?
The trick hides in knowing perks and pitfalls before you run into them. And this article (hopefully a future set of pieces) is aimed to lead you through the waters, providing examples of ‘do’s and don’ts on real failures, pain, sleepless nights and so on. Let’s start!
Real-life project story: Algo Club | Сhallange of success
AlgoClub initiative has a long and, to be honest, not straightforward story in our club. In the first place, it was created last year and succeeded with the first episode. (Yeah, sometimes it happens)
I guess it’s because the main idea: beginners to beginners learning fit perfectly to algorithms case.
The concept as we designed it:
We planned AlgoClub as a full-functioning community for GDSC KPI members. It’s supposed to be an open space where people can share tasks, and challenges, create events and run activities such as coding nights. The essential and brand new idea was to let students speak to students with simple language without complicated terminology (where it’s possible). It sounds like a true GDSC spirit.
How it started:
For the first session, core team members prepared small talks about popular algorithms, with live coding examples and basic theory. And… it went amazing! Of course, we had several “internal demos” to clear up speeches, finalise flow and give novice speakers more confidence.
Our audience was excited to get the desired info with understandable language, and our young speakers were happy with their first experience sharing knowledge. (I highly recommend this approach, no matter that it sometimes gets long enough to prepare, you will have no regrets in the end)
For the next episode, we changed the concept. You probably want to ask why? Why did we touch something that perfectly worked? OK, the reason hides in the preparation process. When I said it was long… well, it was a bit too long. Furthermore, the timing wasn’t the best: it was about exam session time (and we all must confess that exams rule the rhythm at #gdsc, and it’s a fact), and we felt that it wasn’t possible to gather a group of speakers again. So we had only one speaker for the next episode, and it also went more than good— everyone got their piece of happiness, both speaker and audience.
BUT. (It always ends up with it, huh?) We lost the thing about the feeling of community. Of course, we made more events, which were good, but we didn’t manage to build the entire ecosystem.
Another mistake was also significant intervals between speaking sessions. Mixed with the lack of support from us to chat that we created for the community, it turns into AlgoClub getting killed, slowly and painfully.
Please notice that our algorithms-oriented events still have an audience — we have had more than 50 participants for the past one! But the idea to make its ecosystem in all senses has had rough times.
Moral of the story
❌Don’t: go in blind. It sounds not exciting, but you must have your concept and main idea written in detail. Ideally, you should plan your content after the first episode.
✅Do: make a focus group, brainstorming meeting and some single source of truth as a GitHub page. It will help you to involve the core team in action and prevent the idea from being devalued by everyone who forgets about it.
❌Don’t: treat it like a speed run or single-player marathon. No way it will work out like this.
✅ Do: it’s not only a marathon; it’s that one when you’re running with your foot tied to your teammate’s one. It’s overwhelming for one person to run a community like this alone. You should find co-managers from the core team who would be as interested and involved in the idea as you.
❌Don’t: underestimate additional content — prepare sets of valuable materials, links on articles, interesting threads on Leetcode etc. Prepare small blog posts to your primary media, share them to the chat and essential! — let people comment on them.
✅ Do: analyse feedback from the audience and repost your content and videos. Make recordings of your sessions to let people participate on demand.
❌Don’t: never let someone run all roles for the event, such as the speaker, manager, promoter, writer and designer, at the same time. No matter how good a person is motivated, prepared etc. And there are plenty of reasons why it’s wrong
✅ Do: encourage your teammates to try out something new! Maybe your talented designer or content editor still has no clue about their superpower. Allow them to explore, and follow this approach by yourself too.
Summary
The first of the unwritten rules of Google Developer Student Clubs, I guess, is :
“ Don’t be scared to start and to fail, because everyone does both, and it’s beutiful”
Of course, there would be ups and downs. Deep in my heart, I believe that our AlgoClub will have golden times in the nearest future, and I will have a chance to share its glorious story with you.
