This forum thread will contain information about the September 2023 meetup for the HydFOSS community. This will be the first monthly meetup happening in Hyderabad, after the HydFOSS conference on the 29th of July 2023.
A few people reached out to us after the HydFOSS conference and mentioned that they would be interested in hosting the HydFOSS monthly meetup in their company premises. They will hopefully reach out to us within a week or two and we will then be able to announce the date and location of the September monthly meetup.
3 Likes
Update: We have settled on the date and the venue.
Date of the monthly meetup - 23 September 2023 (Saturday). 3-6 PM
Venue of the monthly meetup - CAW Studios, GSquare, Madhura Nagar, Beside Raidurgam Police Station. Location on Google Maps. Info about company - CAW Studios.
Action items -
- [done] Add an entry for Sep 2023 + Hyderabad in Event Timeline - FOSS United to accept proposals
- Decide on number of talks. Tentatively, we will have 5 talks. Of the 5 talks, we could have 1 invited talk and 1 talk from a first time speaker
- Announce on social media platforms that we are accepting proposals + share the relevant links
- Deadline for proposals - Sep 17 (Sunday)
- Should we do a call for volunteers? Maybe not. The internal telegram group already has a number of people who are interested in volunteering so we can skip the open call and announce this at the meetup instead, for a future meetup
- ?
I’m happy to announce that Rakesh Dubbudu, the Founder and CEO of Factly will be an invited speaker for the meetup and he will be talking about Open Data. Rakesh is an Open Data evangelist and experienced transparency (RTI) campaigner in India.
If you are interested in giving a talk at the meetup, please consider submitting a proposal at CFP - FOSS Meetup Hyderabad (September)
If you are interested in attending the meetup, please consider RSVPing at RSVP - FOSS Meetup Hyderabad (September)
1 Like
Postmorten report for the first FOSS United Hyd meetup
The Awesome
The venue host - C.A.W Studios - went above and beyond to help us with the event. They updated their website to highlight the event, created their own graphics using the speaker information we provided to them and posted them to their social media channels, created and displayed posters on the floor to guide audience to the meetup, created posters highlighting various open source concepts.
They’re more than happy to host another meetup in the future and realistically, their space can hold close to a 100 people, if it is fully packed.
I was able to checkout the venue ahead of time and their facilities were more than good enough to host a comfortable meetup.
The Good
- Very low effort first meetup. Rahul (me), Mangesh, Sridhar Katta and a few people spent time to create the web pages, create graphics, post content on social media, and do a little outreach
- We ended up with 35 audience members after 59 RSVPs, 5 of whom were women
- The talks were all well received and there was decent interest in future meetups
- The invited talk by Mr. Rakesh Dubbudu of Factly was extremely well received. He spoke about open data and the need for multi-disciplinary collaboration when it comes to making sense of open data e.g. between a software developer and a data-specific domain expert
- We announced that the next meetup was on Oct 14 and the audience members seemed interested in attending the next event
The Bad
- We (Rahul) didn’t start until the last minute because of which the talks were confirmed at the last minute and we only ended up with 59 RSVP
- We ended up with 0 proposals from women so we had no women speakers at the meetup
- One of the speakers didn’t show up but that worked out in our favor because the event started 15 minutes late and we were still able to end on time (~ 6:10 PM)
- There were power outages during one of the talks but a few of us introduced ourselves to the audience while we were waiting for backup power to come on
- We’re not sure how many students attended the meetup
Takeaways for future meetups
- Continue checking out meetup venues in person before the actual meetup day
- Continue coordinating with social media teams of meetup host companies to aid in outreach
- Announce dates of the meetups a month or more in advance i.e. announce future meetup when current event is happening or about to happen
- Announce RSVPs atleast 2 weeks - 20 days ahead of the actual meetup
- Announce speakers for the meetup atleast 1 week - 10 days ahead of the actual meetup
- Check how many students attend the meetup vs how many professionals attend. Outreach to colleges if necessary. CAW Studios regularly visits colleges for hiring so they’re happy to put us in touch with colleges in/around Hyderabad
- Continue inviting atleast 1 speakers to present to the audience, preferably someone with extensive domain expertise after a decade or more of work experience
- Get atleast 1 or more women speakers for future meetups and improve the number of women attending the meetup. Here again people from CAW Studios are happy to put us in touch with women in their network
- We didn’t take many good pictures of speakers because the lights were off when they were presenting. We should try to capture atleast a few pictures with the slides as the background, maybe during the QnA section of the talk.
2 Likes
My slides from yesterday’s talk:
Looking forward for more sessions!
1 Like
Here’s the presentation from my talk - CSS : A Walk down the memory lane - css-a-walk-down-the-memory-lane.pdf - Google Drive
2 Likes
