How OWASP VITCC is building the communities of Tomorrow

Published in

CYSCOM VITCC

5 min readJun 11, 2021

“We are the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place.” — Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Back in 2018, when I joined OWASP VITCC, it was a small student chapter with untapped potential but lacked the vision we have today. My initiative in the student chapter began in my freshman year with ICRTAC-2018. An annual conference conducted by OWASP VITCC, organizing ICRTAC-2018, involved managing everything from interacting with faculties to regular updates. To hasten the development process, I decided to include my friend circle in the project. Swapnil, Prince, and Raghav were my crème de la crème for this task. Not only do they single-handedly accomplish the tasks, but they also serve as an inspiration on how tightly-knit members can achieve wonders.

Fast forward one year, now, functioning as the Design Head (later converted to Website Department), I started launching several web development initiatives under the Ex-Chapter Leader Arnav, someone who understood the vision clearly. We began by introducing the OWASP VITCC blog, a self-hosted WordPress blog providing cybersecurity tutorials and updates. Within few months, we crossed more than 20,000 views and also redesigned our official website. Slowly, with growing blog readership and incremental social media growth, we began realizing the vision. Then in 2020, COVID hit and presented one of the biggest challenges to me. Don’t get me wrong. We already had a Discord server, a Blogger-based blog, and a community of around 50 members. But the biggest challenge was overcoming the lack of prioritization of our virtual activity. So how did we double our growth in less than six months during a lockdown?

Recent statistics for OWASP VITCC community

OWASP VITCC Instagram handle crossing 1000 followers

Community Building is the Key

Several factors were restricting our growth. Got a group with lots of members and little engagement? Here’s what you need to do to enhance the community (and no, the answer is not autocratic control):

Micromanage — At OWASP VITCC, we began by allocating managers for each subtask, breaking down gigantic departments into smaller subunits such as Blog Management, Caption management, News management. Instead of appointing a single person to handle 50 members, allocate five coordinators to manage the other forty-five. These five coordinators would then provide periodic updates to the overall coordinator.

Some of the micromanagement roles on OWASP VITCC Discord

Track Progress — One of the issues in a large community is identifying the active contributors from the passive (indolent) ones. The latter contributes nothing to the growth and, their removal is essential to accommodate valuable contributors. Instead of tracking progress manually, we developed a leaderboard (Valorant themed, because why not) connected with a discord.py bot. It allows easy update of the leaderboard directly from Discord by the appropriate management team. The tiers and points system inspired by Valorant and GitHub also introduces healthy competition among the community members. Furthermore, we have also automated the tracking on sharing our social media posts via Selenium and easy update of user contribution by utilizing Google Sheets+Discord integration.

Form Bonds — Bonding among the community members is crucial. At OWASP VITCC, we organize events, such as Skribbl, Chess, Valorant, Movie Nights, Music Sessions to break the ice among our community members. An informal WhatsApp Spam Group for the community members is another addition that helped us increase the interaction. Effective bond formation is the reason why one of our community members described OWASP VITCC as a community of F.R.I.E.N.D.S disguised under Cybersecurity.

Just another day in OWASP VITCC Spam Group

Incentivize — No one wants to work without incentive. The search for incentivization is closely related to the overall vision of the community. Formulate the objectives and then decide the incentives to be given upon their successful completion. At OWASP VITCC, not only do we reward our community members with appropriate giveaways and rewards but, we also have a brand new certification application integrated with our discord bot.

OWASP VITCC Digital Locker Integrated with Discord

Feedback — Constant feedback from the community is also mandatory for growth. At OWASP VITCC, we conduct regular surveys and polls to find out what the community wants. Remember that conducting surveys is not enough. Make sure to take necessary actions to accommodate the highlights from the feedback.

So, where does the vision lead?

Currently, we are expanding further by making our Discord server public to become the leading discussion forum for a variety of topics. Our goal is to establish a community for like-minded individuals who can ask technical doubts, career advice, contribute to interesting open-source initiatives, and sometimes listen to music and live stream games. So why not join us on our mission and help us in building the communities of Tomorrow!

Click here to join our Discord and be part of the change!