GCDC Indore: The story so far
Click here to read part two: GDG Cloud Indore — The Road Ahead
The past few months have been quite eventful for our humble community! We organized events with hundreds of attendees, Midnight Questruns, Open source mentorships. We launched a bunch of new mediums including our Newsletter, a new website and more.
In this post, I’d like to recap the many things GCDC Indore worked on and learned from. Another followup post will explore the future of the community, now renamed to GDG Cloud Indore in the year ahead.
Humble beginnings: Next Extended 2018
We started off with Next Extended 2018. We were quite frankly not expecting a large crowd at our first event and were pleasantly surprised to find one!
GCDC Indore Newsletter
Our first unique project was our newsletter. A custom project by organizers & volunteers of the community, the project took a few months and contains quite a lot of information!
You can find all past editions of our newsletter at our website: gcdcindore.dev
Next Extended 2019
Our biggest event on the year, Next Extended 2019 showed us how far we’d come as a community. We released tickets for Next 19 in batches. In our last batch, we managed to sell out 50 Lazy Bird tickets within just 10 minutes of announcement!
Overall, almost 2,280 unique devices hit our ticketing platform for the event. Unfortunately we could only accomodate about 200 people at the event. We hope to hold larger events in the future drawing in much bigger crowds.
Midnight Quest Runs
Midnight Questruns were quite crazy, even for us! During MQR, we challenged our participants to finish three entire qwiklabs quests in just 24 hours.
3 quests is no easy feat. It’s difficult enough to get the time to finish one in a single day, 3 requires a lot of time and willpower! But our participants came through, with dozens completing all 3 quests and many more completing atleast one.
Since then we’ve held Midnight Quest Run 2.0 where we improved on our communication techniques and doubled the percentage of attendees who successfully completed all three quests!
Open Source Mentorship Program
This one’s much newer. We wanted to support our attendees by creating an environment where they could learn, mentor and support eachother.
One way we’ve achieved this is through a platform for our attendees to work on their own open source projects, list them publicly for other attendees to join and receive mentorship from our network!
As of the time of writing this article it’s only been a few days since we launched this, and we’ve already got a few projects up and running with more applications to process! We’ll explore more about this topic on the second part of this article
The journey so far
So far, GCDC has hosted quite a lot of events. Large audiences, small audiences. Speaker sessions & study jams. We learnt a lot from each event, and as our community grew bigger we expanded out of just physical events into remote-connectivity
Today, we have several WhatsApp groups connecting a large number of our regular attendees, we have even held completely remote events (The Midnight Quest Runs)!
In the second part of this series we will talk more about the many things we have planned ahead to improve the format of our physical meetups and to better support our attendees
Challenges we faced
While we continuously kept growing our attendee count & activity, there were quite a few challenges that we had to spend a lot of time working on aswell:
- Diversity — We aimed for maximum diversity. Problem was, how do you go about doing that?
That is a big topic, and perhaps the subject of a future article. One big realization for us was the fact that you can’t get too many women attendees unless you already have a fair representation of women in your own team!
Over time, we realized that the best strategy to boost diversity is to make everybody feel welcome at our events. This means specifically training your team to be on the lookout for new attendees and keep them company, encouraging a safe and open environment and getting as much help as possible to promote your event to all segments! - Interaction- The second major struggle for us was interaction. It was easy enough to invite a hundred people to a venue and give a talk. Whole other beast to tame though when it comes to getting these people to open up, network & interact with the speakers!
Interaction is still a topic of research for us, and we are still experimenting with new techniques to boost interaction in our community.
We’ll explore more about what we have done and are planning to do regarding these challenges in the next part of the article
Finally…
I certainly didn’t cover all the major achievements & setbacks of the community, but i hope this gave you a glimpse of the progress we’ve made so far & the challenges we’re still working on.
Organizing such meetups and other programs has been an absolutely phenomenal experience. We did not expect to receive so much support & enthusiasm from our community and are eternally thankful to our attendees, our partners & sponsors and to Google’s DevRel team for making this all happen!
In the next part of this series, we’ll talk more about our plans for the future
GCDC Indore signing off. GDG Cloud Indore signing on.
