GDG Cloud Indore — The Road Ahead

Click here to read the previous article — GCDC Indore: The story so far

GCDC Indore is now GDG Cloud Indore. What now?

As outlined in my previous article, it’s almost a full year since GCDC Indore was first launched. We went through quite a few projects — A newsletter, 24 hour Quest Runs (Midnight Quest Run) and much more.

Before you go any further, do read this article by Tushar Pal on the vision for GDG Cloud Indore (Coming soon!)

Now, let us explore some of our plans ahead!

Primary Objectives

Going forward, these are our primary targets:

• Diversity — To improve the percentage and interaction from women, minorities, differently abled persons etc
• Interaction (Format) — To change the format of our events so as to make them more interactive rather than a broadcast model
• Interaction (Off event) — To boost interaction in our events through various channels such as social medias, quest runs etc
• Teamwork — To boost networking & build confidence, we want to host events that require teamwork
• Networking — To significantly improve the networking opportunities available for attendees and to provide them the skills to network effectively
• Opportunities — To inform & mentor attendees to take full advantage of programs like GSoC, Nanodegrees, certifications and other highly valuable resources

Let’s take a look at how we intend to achieve this

Community Hour

Community hour is a new initiative. As outlined in our objective, we want to boost interaction within the community and allow our community members to share info/opportunities with other members

To that end, we have a new program: Micro Talks (3–5 minutes)! Community Hour will be at the start of each event. An open format, any attendee can walk up to the stage and talk about anything they want.

Did you finish a great course? A great book? Starting a new open source project? Show it to the community! Talk about your experience & aspirations for the community, or talk about your own community!

Google Summer of Code (GSoC’20)

Being a Tier II city, Indore doesn’t have many applicants that get accepted into Google Summer of Code. This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle where without seniors to mentor them, it is harder for first time applicants to get accepted.

To counter this, we’re aiming to build a network of mentors that have previous been accepted for (Or mentored for) Google Summer of Code to help students identify projects & apply. So far our GSoC group has 100+ applicants and two mentors.

If you’re a GSoC alum and would like to mentor, do reach out at gcdcindore@gmail.com! You don’t need to be based in Indore

Diversity

While programs and forms have their place, one thing they can’t resolve is diversity. One struggle with diversity is that many of our attendees are friends & family of existing attendees. This makes sense, their friends attend our events, talk about it to their friends & post on social media which in turn leads to them attending the events.

A problem though is that this reinforces the status quo. A meetup where 90% of attendees are male means that most of the future attendees will be friends of that 90% group, which are more likely to be male than female.

To break this, we are aiming for a two pronged approach:

• Direct outreach — Through this, we aim to conduct a few events in colleges in Indore so as to get access to a more diverse pool of attendees
• Retention — One golden truth of community is retention. If your attendees feel welcome, respected & ‘part of the group’, they will return. If they feel excluded, underrepresented they will not
  This is a vicious feedback cycle. To break it, we need to put in double time to make sure new attendees socialize well at our events. Often this means having our team members be on the lookout for new faces and making an active effort to make them feel welcome and helping them out with any queries etc

Social Media

We’ve held plenty of events. From hundreds of attendees to a few dozen. But we want our outreach to go farther than just the physical meetups.

Over the last year, we’ve built up a network of family groups through which most active members of our community stay connected. They collaborate with eachother, stay connected and give us continuous feedback on what we should be doing next!

Going forward, we’d like to expand on these groups and also encourage attendees to create their own, independent groups & channels where they can innovate on the format without any involvement from us

Open Source Projects

One initiative we’ve started to better help attendees work with each other and learn is our open source mentorships

We’ve created a program where attendees can apply to receive mentorship for their projects. If selected, they’ll be able to find other attendees to help them through our portal and we’ll try to grant them access to mentors from our network to finish these projects

Fun & Games

Meetups should not be cut and dry. People should not show up, listen and go home. Instead, we want them to have fun (And plenty of it!).

One of our most successful experiments was adding a Kahoot! quiz after every meetup. Following up on it, from now on all our meetups will contain atleast one Kahoot! quiz (And perhaps two. A separate quiz for community hour)

We’re also experimenting with other games we could add, especially team-building based games. Meantime if you have any suggestions, do reach out at gcdcindore@gmail.com!

The most important thing

But the most important thing here is that the above paragraphs, they are not the heart & soul of the community. The heart & soul of the community are the hundreds of attendees sitting in an office on a weekend, listening to a talk on Cloudrun

Throughout all our efforts, we want to maximally improve the experience & opportunities provided to our attendees & to provide them resources to build off of what we give them into their own social circles and self-help groups. We want them to spread what they learn.

Most importantly, we also want our community to work for the larger community: Our city, state, country & the world! We highly encourage nonprofit/open source projects and are willing to provide all resources

And if we can merge the two, fantastic!

Wrapping up

So this wraps up part two of our article. Part one talked about the achievements & setbacks of the past one year. Part two was all about our aspirations for the year ahead.

GDG Cloud Indore is what it is today because of the contributions of many dozens of people. But I’d like to give a shout out to the entire GDG & WTM Indore team. When we started, we were able to tap into the already large pool of resources available to GDG & WTM which helped us scale rapidly and we are eternally grateful for that.

One question that we struggled with a lot was improving diversity in our team & community. I’d like to give a special shout out to these superwomen: Tanishka, Ranu, Aditi & Bushra for building up such a vibrant WTM Indore community and giving us access to their volunteers & resources to diversify our team & providing guidance and promotional support to diversify our audience!

And ofcourse, none of this would have been possible without Google’s DevRel team!

So that’s it! Let’s see what this year has in store for us!