Hero Interview Series — Getting to know the GDG community team with Oh & March
Overview
The interview session covers the GDG community scene in Thailand & what inspires Wittaya (aka Oh) along with Thananut (aka March) to form the group. We invited them to share their personal experience in creating one of the most successful GDG in SEA.
: Q1. AdrianHi Guys, it’s a pleasure to have you for this interview. Can you give our audiences a brief introduction of yourself?
Oh: My Wittaya. You can call me “Oh”, I started Apppi — Digital Solution company for 4 years, Experienced in digital marketing and software developments. I know March from a Google Chrome launch event in Bangkok since 2010 when I was studied Computer Engineering.
March: My March, I’m working in Agoda which specialise in online hotel booking in SEA. I’m a fan of technology and always in touch with the latest tech happenings. I started out as a programmer before working in Agoda. I’m in the GDG for 4 years, 1 year after Oh.
: Q2: AdrianManaging a group of community requires lots of commitments especially when you guys have a full time job as well. What inspires & motivates you to create a GDG chapter? Oh: We think that to do activities in GDG community, we can create a lot of impact to the developers and in between I can learn new things from them. Lots of local developers experience language barrier when it comes to learning new technology skills. So we want to create an environment for people to exchange ideas and to learn more through localized content provided by the chapter. March: We are managing this chapter in our free time. In my spare time, I love helping people to understand Google technologies better and gathering them together to acquire skills and break through language barrier. I really have a passion for doing this.
: Q3: AdrianWhat does it mean to be a GDG leader in your region?
Oh: Bring new technologies from Google to developers, there are a lot of technological updates and new contents to share. The local developers are mostly unaware of these on going stuffs. Being in GDG allows me to talk to the local experts (GDEs) and influencer to understand how we can bring the contents over to the local developers. March: This is good chance for me to catch up/learning the new technology from Google. I’m happy to meet the new people who eager to learn the new thing, seeing the growth/improvement of their ability and encourage them until they can meet them goal. This is really inspire me to be a GDG lead in Thailand.
: Q4: AdrianBeing a community leader does come with it’s own challenges, what are those and how do you overcome them?
Oh: So when i join GDG on the first year, we have monthly meet up with the developers. The event grow from only 30 attendees to a larger scale where it becomes challenging to organize event for this size of crowd. There are many expectation coming from the audience and we have to find ways to meet them.
We have to focus on objectives that measures the impact and think about how often we should do event. We have intentions to do bigger events twice a year.
I once have a feedback from someone who have shown appreciation on our blog posts and how they love the way we conduct the event which allows them to acquire skills needed to create good applications.
March: I think the challenges in Thailand, the culture is different from other countries, most of Thai people is pretty shy to ask the question on public. We have to observe them to about what are they actually need. We can solve this problem by arrange some small private session to allow them discuss directly with speaker. Another challenge is we need to manage attendee’s expectation in each event, some event may too easier/too hard, this is depended on attendee’s. So we need to discuss with team (GDE, Speaker) for understanding the demands the local developers have according to market needs on particular event.
: Q5How do you think Google has helped to support developers?
Oh: I think there a lot online content from Google developer site that they can find easily but I hope Thai developer get more chance to join Google speakers session and see them in person at our event because the audience value their presence very much. March: Google has a lot of good online contents to serve the developers well. And also to help potential speakers deliver the contents effectively. We have managed to invite a Google speaker who are able to come in and speak in one of our session and it is very insightful for the community to understand more about different ways of developing a great application.
: Q6: AdrianWhat are the future plans do you guys have for your chapter?
Oh: We just re-launch our GDG website (www.gdg.in.th) and we will have multiple events for this year that was focused on I/O contents. We want to connect to some other developer communities because they are already doing a lot of events like Angular & Android groups to expand our reach and growing our communities together March: We will continue to grow our community in Thai through I/O recap and other side activities like Android conference, DevFest. Most of this activities we have will happen around bangkok which aims to let developers acquire better skills to create better applications.
: Q7: AdrianFinal question! What kind of advice would you give to anyone who are looking to start their own GDG chapter?
Oh: You have to know the developers and how big of size are they, the topics they want to learn. You need to have to some time you have in hand to dedicate to run the activities for your chapters. People in the community is quite busy, we prepare some template and send through email to speed up the discussion.
Most of the time, we can finalize the plans quickly within the day. Everyone can do the task simultaneously and they have no-limit to conduct any activities to our community, we view each other equally because we are all volunteers.
March: In my opinion, understanding developers is really important, it is easy to start the GDG Chapter but hard to sustain because you need to spend more time and more effort with them. You have to have that passion in not just your community but also in your countries to showcase their capability to the world. Teamwork is very very important, we have stronger community because of our ties. We managed to fulfill and overcome challenging task because we are always communicating with each other to understand their thoughts and moving forward together.
Originally published at http://gdg.in.th on June 27, 2016.
