The Wheels of DevFest Kolkata 19

Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders. ~ Tom Peters

If the above is true, I am obliged to thank the GDG Kolkata lead, Manisha Biswas (Manisha Biswas) for being the perfect leader, who moulded me over the years into someone who could say, “I’ll manage the volunteer team this DevFest”.

And that is when the wheels of DevFest Kolkata’19 started spinning — from the rolling out of the form titled “Call for Volunteers”.

Nearly 150 interested candidates applied. Surprisingly, almost 10% of the entries came from working professionals, and that is when I first sensed the gravity of DevFest Kolkata’19. People irrespective of their day-to-day lives wanted to be a part of the team that would be the gears and the wheels of the huge machinery which we had named DevFest Kolkata.

By the 60 volunteers that we selected, we spanned over 17 colleges and 3 companies. With 58 of them interested in being On-ground volunteers in the D-Day, I set down to recruit leaders for the development and design teams. People, best in their fields, were assigned to these roles — the Web team, App team, Design team, Actions on Google team and the Outreach team.

Text Overload Is a Thing

Being the point of synchronization for the volunteers of DevFest Kolkata’19, I was a part of nearly every official team that scripted this story. And since the last one month, things kept getting more and more crazy — to the peak of having to follow conversations in 10 different groups on WhatsApp (the picture on the left does not contain the most important group of them all — the core organizing group, which was the most active one!).

So at the most exciting points of DevFest preparation, I was replying without a moment’s pause to all these groups, and add on top of it, meetings of each group to discuss strategy. #JustDevFestKolRants

These teams were more than just a bunch of people working together — they were the ones privy to our inside happenings, and their excitement is what kept most of us going when times were tough for the Organizing team.

I remember the Volunteers were not promised any returns (not even stickers, in their onboarding mail) and yet these people worked tirelessly, with their only goal being the success of DevFest Kolkata.

Their untiring support was the reason that DevFest Kolkata despite all odds always felt like it would be a thing to go down in history, and their efforts were the reason that it actually did.

To all the wonderful Volunteers of DevFest Kolkata 2019 — how does it feel now to be in the first official GDG Kolkata Heroes team? 😁

I here sense a strong advent of big happenings at GDG Kolkata now with the support of people who do.

All of them, including the Organizing team are found listed at https://devfest.gdgkolkata.org/team

The teams were led by some highly skilled leaders of their fields — Rivu Chakraborty and Manisha Biswas for the Organizing team, Rimjhim Bhadani for the App team, Shuvam Manna for the Actions on Google team, Paresh Mayani sir and Shuvam Manna for the Outreach team, Sayak Paul taking care of communication with the speakers and other delegates, and sometimes me delegating a few tasks to the Web Team ☺

I cannot here miss out the immense contributions from Indranil Dutta who is now leading GDG Kolkata in partnership with Sayak Paul and Riya G. Thakurta who was one of the elementals of GDG Kolkata and now leads WTM Kolkata!

I’m a writer of rare occasions, mostly getting a bit too emotional. At other times I’m “playing the keyboard” (of the laptop) as per my flatmate. Find my works about Web Dev and Machine Learning at https://xprilion.com