AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019 - The Makeover

When I sat down to write about AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019 experience, it flashed "Why only about what happed on AWS Community Day?" and "Why not what was the effort made over 5 Months to put up this mega event?"
For me, in a nutshell, its more of learning to the hearts content and possibly gained all the experience needed to venture into a start-up IT Company 😊.

The ideation of 3rd AWS Community Day Bengaluru sparkled around mid Jan 2019, while the organizers of AWS User Group Bengaluru (Jeevan, Sathyajith, Runcy, Prashanth & myself-Bhuvaneswari) wanted to do it bigger and better. Jeevan Dongre, the Lead AWS User Group Bengaluru & AWS Community Hero as usual have raised the bar high to have 800+ attendees (close to double compared to AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2018). The intend was to look for the venue within the city limits. After couple of weeks' exploration and analysis, Hotel Conrad was finalised for 27th July 2019 and started backtracking the timeline with the end goal and big picture in mind. First thing was to look beyond a day's event breaking the legacy and that's how workshop was introduced in association with Konfhub Technologies.

• With the retrospect from organizing & hosting AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2018, we have fine tuned our strategy and allocated the portfolio based on the SWOT analysis!
• Jeevan started sending note to our long list of Sponsors who have expressed interests in and have been pretty excited to be part of AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019.
  Call for sponsorships were announced on our social media pages. Sponsorships have always been Jeevan's forte and he did the best this time as well.
• Most of the discussion & planning happened over awsugblr.slack.com with only 3 in-person meetings on a Saturday at cafe coffee day.
• All task allocation and execution was from Trello. Thanks to Sathyajith for the project configuration and management.
• **Important dates to remember: **
  • March 4th, 2019: CFP opens
  • April 10, 2019: Last date for submission of CFP
  • April 15, 2019: Speaker list announcement
  • July 27, 2019: Day of the event
• Wheelsbox.com team lead by Prashanth was in total heroic action
  • Website: A complete overhaul of the Community Day website and it was a phenomenal change from 2018 Community Day Website.
    Well, if you are reading this blog after 2019, you may consider looking at http://communityday.awsugblr.in/2019 and http://communityday.awsugblr.in/ or the successive one. That gave feel of getting ready for a mega event!
  • **Marketing Collaterals: **Sponsor, Speaker, Know your Speaker blog, Speaker Flow presentations for each track, Emailers for Workshop, Conference & Combo and Slide Deck Template You name it something & you will get it in no time.
  • **Website: **Volunteer & Attendee T-Shirts, AWSBUGBLR Buddy Batch, Speaker Memento
  • **Event Goodies: **Gladwin have been our one stop shop for all the goodies, right from AWS Community Day logo Sipper bottles, 800+ Attendee T-shirts, 1000+ AWSUGBLR Logo Buddy Badges, AWSUGBLR logo T-shirts for volunteers and speakers, Speaker Memento and cool bag for the speaker memento. Finally he helped with Sipper bottles with Infor logo for Diversity Program too.
    No matter what, "Never Say No" attitude; I appreciate that!
  • Thanks to Prashanth, Akhil VC, Praveen Gorakala, Krishna Muddi, Rahul Sawant & Gladwin
• Call for Proposals was opened-up on 4th March 2019 and we adhered to the rest of the dates in the schedule till the event.
• **Proposal Selection: **
  We were thrilled with the overwhelming response of 69 proposals to be precise, over & above keynote, sponsored talks and Diversity Program. The most difficult part of the event was to shortlist 26 from the 69. Thanks to Sathya for moving all the proposals along with SlideDecks & descriptions to Trello overnight to simplify the selection process. The selection committee reviewed all the proposals, provided comments and finally unanimously selected talks were updated to the agenda & the speaker list was announced on 15th 2019.
• Harsha Ramakrishnan & Sahil Sharma have setup AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019 booth in an AWS Event on 19th July 2019 to create an awareness about the Community Day. They were also instrumental in running tracks on the Community Day with their previous year's experience.
• Starting with Why you should AWS community Day blog to all the marketing help, Piyush Jalan was standing by and Kaivalya Shah was ready to pitch in wherever required.
• Know your Speaker Blog Series
  Know your Speaker blog series was best in class automation & integration by Sathyajith with 60 lines of quick coding in GO language.
  • User input to the typeform creates a Trello card
  • The GO program reads the Trello card and creates a blog post for the speaker in https://www.awsugblr.in as a draft.
  • Blog Admin can review the draft, make corrections / enhancements as needed and publish it.
  • You may view all the blog posts under Know your Speaker blog series - https://www.awsugblr.in/tags/know-your-speaker/
• Diversity Program
  • Diversity Program have been by baby from day 1 and thanks to Rashmi Sreedharan for all those brainstorming sessions. It was a great experience to devise a program with super good speakers who has greater insight and much more experience in Diversity & Inclusion. Happy to collaborate with several #WomenInTech forums like WiMLDS - India, hersecondinnings.com, Women Who Code Bangalore, Infosecgirls & OWASPBangalore.
• **AWSome Agenda App - **again by Wheelsbox.com Team
  • Agenda App is time aware, shows talks in current time slot when you open
  • Attendee can create his/her own schedule for multi-track events
  • It has kiosk mode, if conference organiser wishes to put this on a screen at the event and since it’s time aware it will always show current talk
    How it works video here - https://youtu.be/-tUR5bI9s6g

• Lucky Dip Alexa Skill
  We had 💯*💯of fun picking a winner for the giveaway at AWS #communityday Bangalore. Thanks to Runcy for developing an Alexa skill by loading all registered attendees (minus speakers/volunteers) that picked a random name from list 🙌
  Code here - https://github.com/awsugblr/cd2019-luckydip. This was super hit in the closing note.

• Runcy had also collaborated with EFY, Facebook Developer Circles Bangalore, Indian Startups, Docker Bangalore, OpenSource Bangalore, CNCF, Data Science Network to promote the event.

• Hosts for 4 Tracks
  Sathyajith, Prashanth, Runcy & Myself took up hosting the four tracks respectively along with 2 additional volunteers for each track and it was a great experience for me to write the emcee script for the event.
• Well, with this wholistic experience, I also had the privilege to write content for website, emailers and blogs.
• Konfhub Technologies, the Ticketing Partner
  Kudos to the whole KonfHub team for the great work behind the scenes in ticketing and on the day of the event for the best registration experience and developing the sponsorship app in record time. Heartfelt thanks to Ganesh Samarthyam & Hari Kiran!
• Sathyajith again did wonders with integration
  • Zapier pro plan for Konfhub ticket sales integration with awsugblr.slack.com slack channel. Every 50th & 100th ticket sale was a celebration.
    All hands were together to promote ticket sales.
  • Buffer pro plan for sending feeds to awsugblr social media
• WOne Creations Private Limited for the ideation, production and execution of events and experiences.
• AWS Community Hero / Hotstar Hero Gaurav Kamboj was our one man army in the social media team on the Community Day! Thanks to Partha & Ilan, Community Leaders from AWS User Group Chennai, for supporting with Goodie Distribution, _Coffee with Gerard _and much more on the event day.
• Very well integrated AWS Community Leaders across India were like pillars and Rashmi Sreedharan was our backbone. Thanks to Rahul Jain & Madhusudhan Shekar for all those encouragements.
• Jeevan did an excellent co-ordination all through the planning & execution, empowered the right people to collaborate on allocated portfolio.
• AWS Cloud was also super excited about our AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019 and announced to the world!

If I have the power to hire for a large enterprise, I would hire all of these highly skilled, self-motivated, committed, passionate organizers / volunteers, who are matured enough to respect & appreciate each others talent. Apparently they are diversified by their skillsets and multitude of talents but united by common goal with the prime focus to get AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019 into flying colours.

Getting featured in YourStory was a booster for the effort that has gone in and the grandeur that was awaited!

5 Months have thus passed like a lightening and proud to be part of these great minds!

See you again at AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2020!

Tags

• communityday 2019 bengaluru