Before getting into the preparation and planning part, let me introduce myself. I work as a front-end engineer at Konfhub Technologies. The first community event I attended was in 2018. Abhishek insisted on me, “Attend once, next time if you don’t feel like it, you may drop out”. To this day, I thank him for dragging me to my first meetup. By the way, Abhishek is our organizer. At that moment, I realized that the community gives us many things if we give back to it. It progressed from attending the event to volunteering, from volunteering to organizing. Networking with several industry professionals. Everyone had so much knowledge to share. It was a journey filled with the give and take of wisdom. Coming back to our topic, let’s know about AWS UG Nashik.
About AWS UG Nashik
We only had a few communities in Nashik but recently people are becoming more aware of communities and their importance. Abhishek started the group in July 2021. He is our organizer. First, we conducted events online due to COVID restrictions. AWS Community Day was our first in-person event
The Planning Phase
We had a very strong network on LinkedIn because of online events. We increased our reach by increasing the popularity of AWS and hosting virtual events on our YouTube channel. Designing social media banners, Goodies for participants, T-shirts for volunteers, mementos for speakers, etc. As it generally happens, community-driven events have one person who takes the lead and others build around him/her. In our case it was Abhishek. He was mainly focused on finance and sponsorship. A call for papers was posted on papercall.io, and we were in the process of identifying a venue.
Pre-event execution
Venue
It was a difficult task. We were all confused about which to choose but there comes Sagar. Who helped us connect with companies that host community events. So, finally, we fixed Winjit Technologies as our venue.
Welcome Note
Selecting ticketing partner
This was a no-brainer. All other community events were done in partnership with Konfhub and the community had a positive experience utilizing their platform. We ended up using the same. Our event was free but invite-only so we used it for waitlisting.
Call for papers
We started accepting proposals for talks in October 2022 via PaperCall.io. The response was great.
D-Day
As organizers, we were at the venue early. Checked all the arrangements over there. Few members were handling the registration desk. Sagar ensured that all logistics and technical things were sorted.
The event started with a Welcome Note from Abhishek. Then there was a speaker line-up with lunch and fun activities to keep the audience engaged. Our anchors Samruddhi and Yash handled the fun activities well. The volunteer and core team was working very hard on event day to keep things smooth. We had lots of meetings within the team and distributed the tasks. If you take on all the responsibility, it will create chaos on the execution day. Trust your team.
It does feel pleasant to sit on the other side of the table from the attendee to the organizer of the event. I might have missed many things because it is impossible to put everything into words thanks to our camera team Shubham Karad and Shubham Patil who captured moments. Here are the highlights.
Panel Discussion
At last, I would like to say thank you to all core team members and volunteers for their support and excellent work. Thank you to our venue partner Winjit Technologies.
Thank you for reading. Signing off. 🙌
Feel free to reach out. 👇
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