We’re excited to announce the theme for our September meetup FOSS for Backend!
Date: Saturday, 2nd September 2023
Time: 2 PM
CFP is open now 
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We’re so excited to announce the speakers for our September meetup based on FOSS for Backend!
: Saturday, 2nd September 2023
: 2 PM
: Rippling Office, Embassy Tech Village
SEPTEMBER 2023 MEETUP RETROSPECTIVE
By FOSS United Bangalore Team
AGENDA
Theme - FOSS for Backend
STATS
- Number of CFPs received: 19
- Number of talks: 6
- Women Speakers - 2
- First-time Speakers - 3
- Speakers invited from the Speakers Pool - 2
- Total Attendees - 70
- Women Attendees - 14
The GOOD
- This was the 2nd themed meetup and it was fully focussed on “FOSS for Backend”. The meetup went very well overall. There was a wide variety of speakers - we had 2 women speakers out of 6 speakers. We also had about 3 first-time speakers who were recognized at the end of their talk.
- Volunteers arrived early and the venue was well set up, with projectors, video recording facilities and others. Thanks to Sweta and team Rippling.
- Since the last meetup onwards we started using the Speakers pool - We have created a pool of speakers from previous meetups whose talks were really good but we weren’t able to fit them into the meetups due to limited slots, variety of talks and so on. And in the last meetup we invited 2 speakers from the pool.
- We also added an option in our CFP form that asks if it’s “First talk” so we can help out speakers if needed to give their first talk and this data also helps us in preparing an agenda and also has a record of first-time speakers.
- This time we were a little worried if people would turn up as the IND-PAK match was scheduled on the same day but we got a good audience turnout.
- We use discord as main source of communication but on the meetup day it becomes tricky to communicate via discord as it needs to be quick so created a whats app group this time which helped in coordinating quickly and have a smoother experience
- The energy at the meetup was high as always and the audience was very engaging
- Riya from FOSSUnited joined this meetup and she introduced OASIS in the opening note
- The hosts Fenil and Ashwini did an amazing job in hosting the meetup and making sure the audience is enjoying every bit of the meetup.
- The exercise done by Shrilakshmi after tea break really energizes the meetup audience so it has become a custom now to have it in every meetup.
- Due to a shortage of design volunteers in the team we weren’t able to make an Agenda Poster, specially which would be accessible. This time we finally made it, Thanks to Varshini and Ishan, for creating one.
- We had a shortage of volunteers in Video Editing and Socials, we got two new members in the team since last meetup Likhith - to help with Video Editing and Sujal for handling Socials.
The Bad
- The scheduled time for the meet was 2:00 pm but we began at about 2:40 pm. We also went out of time, wrapping up at about 5:40 pm.
- One of the speakers took more time than expected so we should try to avoid this and communicate well that we have strict time requirements.
The Ugly
- There were audience questions in between talks - this interrupts the speaker flow. Next time we will mention having QnA during break and not to interrupt the speaker.
- Less diversity - there were women folks in the audience.The good thing is the numbers have been getting better with meetups.
Thoughts and Learnings
- Sometimes we don’t have that info and we often google to find that info which we should be avoiding strictly as we had to revert one of the speaker posters when announcing as the org was incorrect.
We can add a field in CFP form for designation and organisation for the same as well. In any case we should be using only the info provided by the speaker and not anything outside of it. - Each time, we introduce speakers at the beginning of the talk - we can ask them to share their name and position. Maybe we can ask them to introduce them along with their name, the FOSS projects they use or they contribute to.
- Maybe we can have a schedule in place for every meeting - like 4 weeks before meeting to decide the venue, 3 weeks before meeting to open call for proposals, 2 weeks before meeting date, open RSVPs as well as a schedule for preparing posters and posting them in social media handles. Ideally, a FOSS meetup handbook will be great.
Overall the “Theme” experiment has been working very well and we are able to have deep dive talks and Theme focussed audience as well which is great. The audience really enjoyed the meetup and the variety of talks. We will be trying out more themes / workshops in future meetups.
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The "FOSS for Backend” themed September Meetup recordings are now available on our YT channel!
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