A journey with the community
From a passionate volunteer to being a Facebook certified Community Manager & managing diverse communities, a long story.
“કોઈને ઉપયોગી થવાની તક ના ખોવી” by Late Padmabhushan Shri K J Somaiya.
“Nothing in the Nature lives for itself.
Trees don’t eat their own fruit.
The sun doesn’t shine for itself.
Living for others is the rule of nature.”
Advice from a mushroom:
“Be down-to-earth,
Keep a low profile,
Know when to show up,
Start from the ground up.”
Several such quotes have inspired me to help others & create an impact for the society. In this blog, let me share the activities I have been indulged in over the years as a Community Management.
Initial Iterations
Back in school 13 years ago, at the age of 11, a group of people came at my school and shared about an initiative CMCA: Children’s Movement for Civic Awareness, about the various campaigns they do to conserve nature and invited us to volunteer for their Beach cleaning activity. This was the first moment which interested me to volunteer & help spread the awareness to the city residents.
Since then, I participated in several volunteering opportunities during my college days till I found this game-changing opportunity in 2015 to volunteer for a Makers’ Community: Maker Mela.
Story of game-changing opportunity
In 2015, during my undergrad days, a couple of students came to our class and shared about Maker Mela — Asia’s Biggest Maker Gathering and invited us to volunteer for the event. I along with 6 of my classmates found this opportunity super interesting and we participated as a volunteer for the event in PR team. Our roles included to travel across Mumbai city and setup desks in different colleges to spread awareness and get registrations for the event. Apart from this, we organized a Cycle drive across the 65 acres Somaiya Vidyavihar campus, wherein we had promotional posters stuck up on the cycles.
This was the first edition of Maker Mela too, and we had a very small team of 7 core team members and 7 volunteers to handle all the operations of the event. This event sparked my interest to be associated with the organizing body of Maker Mela — riidl and work on more projects.
The very next year, in 2016, I again volunteered for Maker Mela and got promoted as a Head, Social Media team. I managed a team of 20 volunteers and 2 executives. At Maker Mela 2017, we launched Mumbai chapter of Meta Developer Circles and hosted 400+ developers at the launch.
From 2017, I started volunteering for a number of meetups & events organized by Meta Developer Circle: Mumbai under the leadership of Gaurang Shetty, Lead, Meta Developer Circle: Mumbai & CEO, riidl.
Professional Career
Soon it was 2018 and my days at engineering college were about to end. Upon graduation, I received a campus placement offer to work in an MNC. But I decided to stay back & work at riidl, India’s leading startup incubator, where I had participated and volunteered for multiple initiatives across 3 years as a student.
Just before I joined riidl officially as a full-time, I along with Gaurang received an opportunity to attend APAC DevC Leads Summit by Meta Developer Circles at Meta HQ in Singapore. We participated in various brainstorming sessions on improving diversity within our community, partnering with communities, growing engaged groups & more.
At riidl, I work as an Operation Executive and often juggle between daily operations while managing various communities along with riidl team members.
- One being the Maker Mela community for hosting top 100 Makers’ and startups across globe while collaborating with several makerspaces, Fablabs, startup incubators and organizations. In 2021, we created a platform for makers [makermela.com] to exhibit their innovations, also regarded as Asia’s Largest Platform for Makers. Projects of more than 100 Makers from over 15 countries are showcased on the Maker Mela platform & have received a traction of more than 75k views from an audience of over 83 countries including 750+ cities across the globe. In the past, Maker Mela has received patronage from prestigious initiatives like UNESCO, Startup India, Skill India and NYCS. Kindly check the impact we have created in the past 6 years: Impact report.
- Other building a community of science researchers and bio-enthusiasts through Darwin community by organizing an annual conference consisting of hands-on / virtual workshops, talk sessions, panel discussions and research symposium. A year back, in 2020, we started Working Groups who can work on year-long research and present their work during the next Darwin conference. This year, in 2021, we also partnered with 13 Biolabs & communities to host Regional Darwin conferences in their local timezones & languages thus making the community more inclusive.
Story of my journey with Meta Developer Circle: Mumbai
Being a passionate volunteer and building developers’ community at Mumbai with Gaurang, we had another opportunity to present our community activities during 2019 Meta DevC India Leads Summit. At the Summit, I had an impromptu opportunity to deliver a talk on Documentation and the ways we document our activities for Meta DevC Mumbai community. We learnt a lot of principles like defining ABCD for our community (Building an A team, Building Products, Collaborations & Diversity). And the most important lesson of #OneTeam while brainstorming on how-to’s of engaging attendees of offline meetups in online environment.
In 2020, when everything went virtual, we started to think more creatively to conduct meetups and training while rewarding the members virtually. In one of our Online Training on How to build a Messenger Bot, we rewarded a member with a paid internship offer to build a Messenger Bot for an organization.
Continuing with the pandemic, in 2021, we started a series of episodes on Talking Tech with Innovators by Meta Developer Circle: Mumbai in collaboration with Maker Mela where inspiring innovators, developers & entrepreneurs from our local community share their journey every weekend!
While doing multiple activities & empowering developers through organizing various trainings & meetups, here’s to the achievements that WE globally created as a community:
- Meta Developer Circle: Mumbai is awarded as the “Most Innovative Circle” at the 2019 Meta DevC India Leads Summit.
- Meta Developer Circle: Mumbai is awarded as the “Spirit of Developer Circles Award” & Gaurang received the “Master Hacker Award” during the Meta Developer Circles End of Year Awards Ceremony 2020.
- Meta Developer Circle: Mumbai is awarded as the “Community Resilience Award”, Gaurang received the “Best Supporting Lead Award” & I received the “Most Inspiring Lead Award” during the Meta Developer Circles Awards Ceremony 2021.
- Meta Developer Circle: Mumbai is awarded as the “Community Resilience Award”, Gaurang received the “Spark AR Creator Days Organizers Award” and I received the “Developer Circles Presence Award”, “Best Supporting Lead Award” & “Master ‘Hacker’ Award” during the Developer Circles 2021 End of Year Awards Ceremony.
Formal Education
Though I was managing multiple communities, I didn’t had a formal education in Community Management. I completed my graduation in IT Engineering and kept volunteering passionately to the opportunities that interested me. This is the moment, I decided to step up and pursue a formal training in Community Management and started studying for Facebook Community Manager certification. With the practical experiences over the years, I was able to learn concepts in much better and quicker way. Along with a dynamic curriculum, the practical use-cases during the examination helped me to understand the underlying processes of Community Management so I can help my community members more effectively. I have successfully passed the examination & achieved the Facebook Community Manager Certification.
Retrospective
My career is still ongoing, therefore this is only a quick initial retrospective. These are some of the valuable learnings that have helped me over the years:
- Data is Gold: Capture every unique moment you see in any form, can be a photo, video, audio or even written notes.
- Create Experiences: Create meaningful & impactful experiences for your community members, ask them, survey them and then build events, conferences or a Metaverse for them :)
- Grab Opportunities: If the opportunity interests you even 1%, deep dive into it, research about it and get associated with the opportunity.
- #Friend: No matter how your life is doing, stay connected with your friends. Take time from your busy schedules, go for a food treat or a long walk but connect with your friends.
One part at a time, one day at a time, we can accomplish any goal we set for ourselves. Everyone has a goal, that they plan to achieve. For me, its “creating impact”, what’s your goal? Let me know in the comments.
