Why should You be a part of the community?
“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.”
— Ronald Reagan
How it all started?
After being a full-time mother and sabbatical for almost 5 years, I wanted to restart my career, get back to frontend development, I started spending a long time of my day in learning, so much changed in frontend during 5 years, Javascript frameworks have almost started ruling the Industry and I felt almost lost and untrained, passion for learning and love for technology has been a great motivation for me to keep going and learning.
Community Leader: Started as a passion, with the intention to learn, share and explore new technology eventually landed up networking and meeting like-minded people.
My heart was in development always, But my interest in UX developed as it was like quenching the thirst to understand and give directions to design, curate software, adding more functionalities in a meaning full way and make the software more understandable for a non-technical person.
A simple error can frustrate you but a meaning full sentence can help you figure out solutions.
Community Engagement changed my life, credit goes to IDF, where learning about design thinking touched my heart, course let my creative juices flow and yet passion to learn more lead me to form the community, pursued passionately to learn the practical use of UX, let meetups get started, I was fortunate to find my co-organisers of IDF_NewDelhi and ReactDelhiNCR-{JS}Brackets with similar craziness & passion which made it a smooth sail and last month we had 13th meetup for IDF in a row in just one year. Now, feel proud to say running three communities successfully.
2nd community is related to advocating JS frameworks in collaboration with ReactDelhiNCR Community went another level by getting trained by Industry experts and solving problems like a pro during workshops. Learning from tutorials helps you, but you need to practice until you are able to get that piece of code yourself and only workshops encourage you to learn by doing.
Why community?
- Learn:-Being a part of the community is beneficial for part of your personal growth, the community gives you mentors, buddies, like-minded people, people who are struggling just like you. Learn and share knowledge with the community and advocate the value of giving back to society.
- Networking:- You will find people who will help unconditionally, give you guidance, who has walked the same path, you are about to start, gives you life hacks to survive in the industry. Build Network, expand possibilities, get creative ideas, work in collaboration with multiple setups, get Job work help from the community of varied profiles.
- Find Opportunities:- Recruiters also sometimes started to visit meetups in order to find a suitable candidate. Participate in or attend community events that will help build a network.
Who should be part of the community?
Anybody who believes in being a student for life, eager to learn new things every day, enthusiast, amateurs, explorers, in search of knowledge on the other side want to share their knowledge and experience and let others have the leverage to gain out of their experience
How to form a community?
Forming a community is quite a task, but if you are passionate and determined, you definitely find ways and once things come into the flow you start loving it more. Try keeping it free!
Organised first meetup
It was not very difficult to organize IDF meetup and take it to another level. IDF New Delhi, having meetups every month became easier when co-working place(91springboard) came into the picture, they sponsored us with open arms to organize free meetups with and not only did they allowed us to held meetups.
The community lets you meet new people with same lakshya, same desires, same problems, looking for the same solutions.
You land up finding weekend buddies, soul mates, strugglers like you, people with a similar situation and also an opportunity to find people who find potential in you for their organisation. It helps companies with hiring people. Personally, I found Mentors who understood me, helped me recognise my potential and showed my path best suited for me.
To start a community you need-
- A speaker- an industry expert, willing to share knowledge, have enough experience to deliver knowledge, clear doubts.
- Decide day, date and time suitable for your area, like we usually pick Sundays, where people have off, wake up late after a long tiring week, but a good topic can motivate them to come out of lazy mode.
- The venue, preferably a central place that can be approachable by all, otherwise half will back out or just be lazy to come at far places.
- Create a Poster or creative to announce your meetup, with all details, agenda of the meetup and speaker description…make it looks worth attending as people would be sacrificing there weekend. On the other hand, also get registrations done to know the approx amount of heads turning up.
- Promote Your Event over social medium — Publish your event on Event pages like Facebook, it lets you create an Event, there are many options nowadays like Eventbrite, meetup.com(paid), Commundle, an initiative by GDG Community lead. Spread it to related groups on Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Make it reach to the relevant mass.
Pros of being part of Community
- Build Network, expand possibilities, get creative ideas,
- Learn and share knowledge with the community and advocate the value of giving back to society.
- work in collaboration with multiple setups, get Job work help from the community of varied profiles.
- You are not alone: helps you in public speaking fear, stage fear
- Job opportunity, give back to society, drive my passion for giving back
Cons
It is difficult to pursue meetups when you are working in the IT Industry, Weekdays you work and weekends for meetups are tiring, but again as I said if you are passionate, Nothing can stop you.
