DrupalCamp Goa - An Adventurous Saga

Submitted by GAURANGAGG on Wed, 06/27/2018 - 21:04

Around the globe, organisations and individuals take the initiative and organise the DrupalCamps. To make the DrupalCamp happen, they invest their resources in terms of financial capital, human resources and everything else which is required to deliver a good camp!

Goa is a destination city in India, popular for its beaches, parties, scenic views. Every year millions of foreigners and Indians visit the city for their vacation and for the leisure.

Goa is a home of millions and has some 100 odd IT Companies offering digital solutions. Since Srijan had one of its development centers in Goa, Srijan volunteered to spearhead the project by organising the camp and allocating bandwidth of its developers for volunteering to the camp.

Being the community manager there at Srijan - my full bandwidth was donated to the DrupalCamp and I project managed the DrupalCamp Goa.

So, the first step we took was to decide the format of the DrupalCamp Goa - which we finalised as the 2 days camp with 20 Sessions spread across 6 session Tracks namely Coding and Development, Community & Business, Site Building, User Interface & User Experience Designs, Symphony/ PHP, Beyond Drupal.

While doing that we were facing chicken egg problem - what will come first ( Sponsors or the Venue / Venue or the Registrations / Registrations or the Speakers and all other combinations ) and wondered what would be the scale of event - considering the fact that for more than 2-3 years there haven’t been any Drupal Meetups and there didn’t exist any formal Drupal Community.

It was a risky proposition to brand the event as a large one as then failing it would lead to disappointment among the organisers, sponsors and the budding community.

With the goal to fostering the Drupal Community in Goa, we went ahead with the graphics work which was the central piece of all the marketing and web related tasks and Suhail Lone managed it exceptionally well. Suhail Lone worked hard day and night for 2 months to deliver the best possible designs which resonates with beach and fun theme of DrupalCamp Goa. Thereafter we started with the development of Website and the crew ( Manjit Singh, Yogendra Prasad, Udit Verma ) worked day and night to make it happen.

Daily catch up call used to take place without fail and our volunteers and crew members - Shreyal Mandot, Gaurang Agrawal, Manjit Singh, Yogendra Prasad, Surabhi Gokte, Udit Verma, Vaibhav Jain, Parth Gohil, Ashish Dalvi used to be available for brainstorming.

To make any DrupalCamp happen, besides the human capital and creativity, capital is required to make necessary arrangements.  

Parth Gohil from Axelerant, Vaibhav Jain from Acquia, Ashish Dalvi from Iksula, Piyush Jain came forward and helped me with the different strategies of outreaching to prospective sponsors for the event.
We approached Drupal Association for their support and in a matter of days they supported us with the grant which we needed badly.

First three weeks of chasing our Sponsors was of great struggle and we reached out to a dozen Goan companies as well as some of the renowned Drupal Shops.

Srijan, Drupalize.me, Persistent Systems and UCM Foundation of India came forward and became our Gold Sponsors, Axelerant, QED42, Drupal Partners became our Silver Sponsors. Indeed, they were our community’s heroes as they kept faith in us and supported us.

Marketing initiatives were managed by me directly and I approached all the universities and IT Companies located at Goa and I perpetually outreached to spread the awareness and invite them to our DrupalCamp Goa. The goal was to get as many as session proposals, attendees as well as volunteers.

In parallel, we ( Gaurang, Chetan Parker, Sayali Prabhudesai ) were negotiating with Goa University to get the venue where we can host our attendees. Mr. Ramdas Karmali ( Professor - DSCT ) was extremely supported and he negotiated with the management and ensured that we get the best Auditorium for our camp.

We received over 115 session proposals and 20 out of them got selected.

 And there was astounding excitement among the chosen speakers:

Drupalers from all over India ( New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and nearby cities ) were traveling to attend the DrupalCamp Goa which was going to help us in achieving the goal of making it a DrupalCamp full of diversity.

The night before the DrupalCamp was eventful. The DrupalCamp Goa's volunteering team spent whole night making necessary arrangements so kudos to Manjit Singh, Prajact Sawant | Registration Booth - Yogendra Prasad, Vikash Choudhray, Aneesh Anand, Prajact Sawant, Udit Verma,Rooms (Includes Hiring + Sessions + workshop), Manjit Singh, Surabhi Gokte, Dinesh KD ,Raam Yadav, Joshua Fernandes & Aman Kanoria | Sponsors Booth - Udit Verma, Parv Jain | Food & Directions - Prajact Sawant, Yogendra Prasad | Goa University's Support Staff - Deepak & Gaurang ( Goa University Staff ).

Parth Gohil, Vaibhav Jain, Ashish Dalvi, Senthil, Suchitra Kumari's support was indispensible for the event as they were the part of advisory team which perpetually guided me and acted as the support group to ensure that their experience with the community can be leveraged for the benefit of community at large.

And finally on the Day 1 of the event, we reached the venue at 6 in the morning, all set to welcoming the Camp Attendees. We received attendees of all age groups ( 11 and above ) and of different professions ( School students, University Students, Architecture Students, Professors, Entrepreneurs, Sales and Marketing Professionals of different IT Organisations, Developers - FrontEnd, Backend, Scrum Masters and Project Managers ).

Every event needs a Keynote Speaker who has got deep industry insights and can inspire the entire community. Special thanks to Parth Gohil who invited Mr. Pankaj Verma as the Keynote Speaker. Mr. Pankaj is the Enterprise Architect at IBM Global Business practice. He has been working in the industry for 22 years & has done his Masters in Systems from IIT Delhi. He worked for last transformation projects for Airtel, SBI digital initiatives, Vodafone Digital Initiatives, Smart City engagements in Lodha. He published his papers on publicly accessible platforms like Quora, LinkedIn & Medium.

Everyone enjoyed the Keynote and Twitter was flooded with the feedback. Followed by the Keynote session, there was tea break post which attendees went to respective rooms for attending sessions of their choice. Audience was delighted with the kind of sessions were selected and the depth to which they got delivered by the speakers. One of the key highlight of DrupalCamp Goa was the Full Day Drupal Workshop which was attended by about 70 attendees.

The youngest attendee was 11 years old. Drupal Developers from Srijan Technologies namely Ashutosh Singh, Love Huria, Panshul Khurana, Shreyal Mandot, Jithin Varghese Jose, Ranjeet Kumar, Vishwa Makarand Chikate, Kaustubh Bhagwat, Shishir mentored during the workshop:

Special thanks to our shutterbugs - the official photography team (Nitin Kumar, Sabbi Kohli, Abhishek Prabhu, Senthil Kumar, Sanjay Salpatre) of DrupalCamp Goa who volunteered and captured hundreds of memorable moments during the 2 days of DrupalCamp.

Some glimpses from DrupalCamp Goa 2017:

Some of the Attendees, Volunteers of DrupalCamp Goa - Photo Credit: Nitin Kumar.

Shreyal Mandot and Love Huria during the Drupal Workshop - Photo Credit: Sabbi Kohli

Session by Sami Ullah - Photo Credit: Abhishek Prabhu.

"Let me walk you through the code" : Swarad - Photo Credit: Senthil Kumar.

Event concluded with 2 bonus workshops: Demystifying Blockchain by Anil Chandana Tableau for Data Visualisation by Sumit Goyal In all, over 150 attendees on Day 1 and 110 attendees on Day 2 attended the DrupalCamp Goa making the first DrupalCamp Goa a success event and it was concluded with the hope that the community will thrive for years to come. Some glimpses from DrupalCamp Goa:

Link to DrupalCamp Goa Album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/2Ri0Y5r4zfqT48Lw1

DrupalCamp Goa 2018 Report:

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