GDG New Delhi — What’s Different Here?
One of the habits that I have developed over time is constantly asking myself and others — ‘What’s Different Here?’
For about 1.5 years, as a young developer and more as the only developer at a startup, GDG New Delhi had been my window to interact with and learn from fellow developers. And with every event, whether as a speaker or as a member, I saw growth, both personally and for the members (who were always excited to attend these events).
Soon, an opportunity to be on the other side came by!
The Experiment
It was January 2017 and I was given an opportunity to join the Organizing team of GDG New Delhi. I was very excited, overwhelmed, nervous and so many more things!
It was around May 2017 and plannings for I/O Extended event were in full swing. As it was my 1st big event, I asked ‘how would this be different?’ Well, we decided to have a specific and focussed networking session. Why? Because having been on the other side, I could always see that usually people came in groups and were a little shy to interact with fellow attendees, but they did interact with speakers as they’d heard them on the stage. A simple solution was to make more people share their story so that they all feel included.
But you know, we’re techies, built to talk to their machines all the time and it’s a task to get them into the mode of human interaction! :D Also, it was the 1st time my team and I were doing something like this. On the day of the event, about 80 attendees were present & the atmosphere was electric. After the tech sessions were over, it was time to kick-off the networking session. We were worried they wouldn’t participate, but the picture below captures just one moment of a very talkative session!
How did this happen? The solution was to step down from the stage and share something from my experience and set the ball rolling. This was a huge step up for me and again a confidence booster for being able to experiment and handle the event.
And it was a different experience to work with a set of super charged up volunteers, ready to handle everything!
Expanding our reach
As time progressed, I got acquainted with the nuances of being an Organizer. By now, I was enjoying each and every moment of this part of my life. GDG New Delhi was my playground, a limitless one! But I decided it was time to try something new for the community — Expand our reach for the next big event.
DevFest 2017 was on the horizon and I thought that this was a great place to start expanding our reach. GDG Delhi actually covers Delhi/NCR, with major parts being three cities viz, Delhi, Gurugram, Noida. So I thought, why not conduct DevFest 2017 in all 3 cities with 3 different themes?! As we (Rohan Arora & I and our new co-organizer to-be — Rohan Taneja) brainstormed on the execution — we found our solution: We’ll manage everything well in advance and assign 1 organizer with volunteers at each location.
Here was our process:
-. We planned everything 2 months in advance for the 3 locations. We decided to have 100 seats at each location.
-. The themes:
- Gurugram: Web them
- Noida: Mobile theme
- Delhi: Mixed theme with multiple tracks
-. A little over 300 people turned up! (which was a first for our community)
-. And with this, GDG New Delhi became the first ever GDG to organize a DevFest simultaneously at 3 locations!
-. This process also got us in touch with so many more speakers and people who wanted to contribute to the community
While the experience was terrific & we learned a lot from the organizing perspective, we realized that we needed a bigger team to pull-off more such amazing events!
Building the ‘A-Team’
So, obviously, the next step was building & growing the team! Coincidentally, at the same time we looked out for an ambassador from the community to revive the Women Techmakers New Delhi chapter.
And so, Anubha Kushwaha was appointed the ambassador! Soon we became a team of 4 people as GDG New Delhi and Women Techmakers were now one strong team. She lead the community for a good one year, giving it great stability, forming a very responsible team of future ambassadors and creating a repository of everything the community organized. All of this and much more for a good 1 year. Since then, we’ve organized all the events together from Women Techmakers and GDG New Delhi.
Finding the right community leaders builds a stronger team. All our leaders had/have the following traits:
- good hands-on knowledge of at least one technology
- are down to earth but take a stand whenever needed for the team
- lead by example
- respects members and puts others before self
- trusts and depends on team members/volunteers and gives them a chance to take the lead.
After Anubha, we had new Women Techmakers ambassadors, Shilpa Garg, Shreya Gupta and Shilpi Gupta. Our work got distributed, everyone had a can-do attitude and we started functioning like a small organization by 2018.
Together, we have conducted numerous events including GDD Extended, I/O 2018 Extended (again at 3 locations), Android Day 2017 (a series we started), ‘Actions on Google’ Study Jams, Cloud Next and more.
Every time we rotated tasks/responsibilities so that everyone was well versed with each task and could fill in each others’ shoes. The synergy’s been great.
Making Solutions For The Community + Collaborating
Somewhere around February 2018, I thought we could make a community management tool for the registration process we had created for DevFest 2017 to increase our efficiency as a team. After all, we’re a tech community!
So I created — Commudle — a tool to manage registrations, speaker management and more.
With DevFest 2018 coming up, the whole team was super pumped to make it different from what we had already done. And now this platform, Commudle, would literally be a boon for us. Here is the process we used:
- Announced ‘Call for Papers’ about 2 months before the event
- It has inbuilt forms and one-click shortlisting
- The shortlisted speakers were displayed automatically on the event page - Opened registration forms a month in advance
- With inbuilt forms, again, we had one-click shortlisting
- Shortlisted members were sent an RSVP email with a link to say ‘YES’ or ‘NO’ which would automatically change their status to ‘confirmed’ or ‘canceled’.
- All the confirmed members were sent Unique Entry Pass Codes.
- We received about 2200 registrations for 550 seats! - Tracks, Speakers and Volunteers, all managed through this tool (we could’ve even managed multiple locations with it!). Here is how DevFest 2018 looked for us:
- 4 Session Tracks
- 2 Mini tracks (Speaker hours + Community Lounge)
- 30+ Speakers
- 40+ volunteers, all registered on Commudle and able to mark attendance
- On the spot registration available (which was actually a secret) - Partnered with/invited 5 more communities to make it a Fest and inclusive for everyone
- We were able to increase the efficiency by 5x for the whole team.
It was the largest turnout for us with about 700 people attending the DevFest. Every piece of information, process flow, including feedback forms was managed smoothly using Commudle.
More benefits of Commudle
At a recent community leaders’ meet in Delhi, we discussed what are the common things which would make a community organizer’s life easy, and all of them had some common points which we’ve solved here.
As a step forward, we opened this up for any community to sign up. Currently, 22 tech communities are using it to manage their events, including GCDC New Delhi, some Developer Student Clubs, WiMLDS Delhi and WWC Delhi.
It feels good to create a solution from within the community which makes our life easy as an Organizer and a member too. This acts as a central repository with each speaker’s sessions across multiple communities. Members can directly start a conversation with them through the platform itself. More so, the Organizers can send all the communication emails in just one click, by choosing what they want to send in a pre generated, clean format.
Who knows, someday, it may be adopted as the global platform for Tech Communities by both Organizers and Members! :)
In time, our objective with GDG New Delhi is to make this a source of solution-creation for society as we, as a community, are the people that are passionate about learning, building solutions and solving problems for everyone through technology!
This is just the beginning, a lot more is to be done and a lot more people to be reached out to, and an even stronger network of friends to be made. If you are in the Delhi NCR region and are looking to learn about tech and make friends for life, do join us at GDG New Delhi. Remember, keep making solutions to everything you think can be made better, that’s how we keep moving forward. And if you need any help, feel free to ping ping ping ping ping!
