MetaKGP was started 3 years ago to bring together engineers, hackers and artists from IIT Kharagpur to celebrate participation and collaboration in various forms. With 2018 bright upon us, we are pushing towards expanding beyond our inquisitive little group of 400 members and highlight everything the large and brilliant community in KGP has been working on. Introducing, Demo Days.
With Demo Days, we aim to create a lasting tradition of celebrating high impact projects worked on by the community at KGP for KGP. Demo Days will highlight impactful projects every two weeks, and randomly reward one project with a cash prize.
How would it work?
Demo Days will be held once every two weeks. The submissions can be written/made by any number of people. All initial submissions will be screened by an arbiter before the demo to make sure they meet the following criteria:
- Many (10s or 100s) of people could potentially use it (i.e. not hobby projects that no one else would ever use, even though those are cool)
- It works; it’s freely available, and will be up for the foreseeable future (i.e. not something only shown for Demo Day)
- The part being demoed is substantially new or different from anything submitted anywhere else (i.e. don’t resubmit old projects or things also submitted elsewhere, or done as part of society/department/hall/curriculum work, unless you substantially improved it since then)
If the above conditions are satisfied, the submission qualifies to be a participant and will be given around 3 minutes to demo at the announced time and venue. Although not disallowed, participants are encouraged to focus more on preparing a kickass demo accompanied by verbal explanations of the what/why/how rather than preparing PPTs.
All final participants will be highlighted on our blog and a cash reward will be given to a winner randomly chosen (by a computer program) from one of these participants.
That’s it!
Example demos
Obvious high-impact things you can demo:
- (features for) software projects
- data visualisations
- substantial improvements to the wiki
Unorthodox high-impact things you can demo:
- a workshop or hackday you successfully organised (for MetaKGP or on your own)
- artwork (including posters, videos)
- administrative decisions you successfully lobbied (e.g. getting physical copies of question papers from the exam control centre)
The only caveat is that you should explain how you did it, what you learned, and how others can benefit from it. In this spirit, submissions are also generally expected to be FOSS or CC or similar.
What’s in it for me?
Well, first and foremost being the joy of presenting your work in front of an audience! There’s a social reward in showing off something you built in front of many people. Being able to demo something often marks you out among other interesting people as someone who gets things done.
As a consequence of the first, you will also be finding people who might be interested in your project and want to collaborate with you to make it better.
Demo Day can provide a highly visible convergence point for you to work on interesting, high impact projects. When people have concrete goals or deadlines, they end up at least paying attention to them, and often work to meet them.
Finally, you get a chance to win some cash — hard to complain about that!
Hmm… but why is the winner chosen at random?
Demo Day is primarily about incentivising people to create more useful projects. Although random lottery is a weird payout scheme, it has some surprising advantages:
- It incentivises you to demo your project as long as it’s useful, even if it’s not the “best”.
- It incentivises you to demo something as often as possible, ideally every Demo Day.
- Once a demo meets a minimum bar, there’s no incentive to “compete” against it, so at worst you’d be indifferent, and at best you’d help make other demos more awesome.
- There’s no need for a judge, so no problems with favouritism, and less resentment at winners.
- “But demos just need to qualify, so they won’t be very good” — yes, but we hope the opportunity to show off something cool in front of a crowd of people will be enough to push you.
Interested?
Sign up here to participate in our first Demo Day on 17th of January, 2017 at 9PM IST! Subscribe to our Facebook page or join our mailing list for more updates.
Sign up link: https://goo.gl/forms/daUdHW2HRK1QfuK83
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/metakgp/
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/metakgp.official
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/metakgp-announce
Demo days will also be streamed live on our YouTube Channel. Subscribe to the channel for updates.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUgekHbc-ntGOh4AwzOPoNQ
Still curious?
Come hang out with us on Slack (https://slack-invite.metakgp.org/) or our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/metakgp.official/) and let us know what you think.
See you at the next demo!
