Organizing my first tech FOSS Meetup

This is my first general blog in which I will be sharing my experience organizing the first meet-up of SolapurFOSS.

After the SolapurFOSS Conference

SolapurFOSS is actually handled by my friend Mangesh, and under his lead, we conducted our first FOSS conference in Solapur on 27th August 2023. Later, after successfully organizing the SolapurFOSS conference, the three of us ( Me, Mangesh, and Jacob ) were deciding on conducting a Linux installation workshop. Mangesh had good knowledge about Linux, but Jacob and I were terrible at it. We didn’t even know how Linux works, how to install it, what a kernel is, what a shell is, or how to install various things just by writing a one-line command. So, we decided to first understand all these things and then share our knowledge with others. At the same time (as we were in our last year of diploma), we had to create a final year project. Managing all this stuff was really difficult; we used to read about Linux, try to create our final year project, and then had to give our semester exams. While this was going on, Mangesh took permission to leave college for a whole semester for his internship, and because of all this, we didn’t organize the workshop.

Conducting Session

So, after 6 months, we decided to take a session for junior students of our college, covering what Linux is, what FOSS is, etc. This helped students get an idea about FOSS, and many of them were interested in learning more about it. One girl, Akshara, reached out to us; she was curious and wanted to be a part of SolapurFOSS. We included her in our team, and now she handles our social media platforms. Now, the scenario was that our organizer got busy with his office stuff, Mangesh had to manage his office work and some FOSS community work, so he didn’t get time to look after the SolapurFOSS community. At this moment, Mangesh passed the leadership to Me and Aabha for conducting meet-ups or sessions so that our community would still remain alive. Jacob used to create the designs of posters and social media posts for our community.

Meet-up Planning

In the last week of February, we, the team members, decided to conduct a meet-up in March. We decided to conduct the meet-up at Mangesh’s house because we didn’t expect that many people would come. For the meet-up, our first speaker was Vishal Aarya. Vishal was busy with his work and was unable to give an offline talk, so we decided to keep it virtual. Next, we managed two speakers who were our volunteers, Mangesh and Aabha. Mangesh’s topic was ‘What is an Engineer’, and Aabha was giving a talk on her project ‘An agricultural bot for smart farming’. Then we reached out to one of our senior college students, Roni, to propose a talk for our meet-up, and he said yes. So, the date was fixed, the place was fixed, and we were good to go. As we were just left with 3 days for our meet-up, we got 38 registrations. Because of this, we decided to change the place and booked our college conference hall.

The Meet-up Day

We were left with 3 speakers; Roni had to cancel his talk due to some traveling issues. We wanted to start the meet-up at 10:30, but there was just one guy present for the meet-up, lol. We waited until 11:30, and a few students came. Also, one of our staff members asked our college students if they wanted to attend the meet-up, and they were interested. So, in this way, there were around 20 students present at the meetup. We began with Aabha talk and then moved to Vishal’s. Again,we made a last moment change, The virtual talk by Vishal Aarya was not conducted as he was moving for some other event. Lastly, Mangesh gave his talk and ended the meet-up. We found that there were more female attending the meet-up; only 3 male were present.

Next Plan

We are planning for another meet-up in May. When we asked students if they liked the meet-up and if they wanted to attend such meet-ups in the future, many of them were interested. Also, Vishal said that he will give an offline talk in the upcoming meet-up.

That’s how our meet-up ended, and yes, it was fun managing all this stuff as an organizer. Also, as this was my first non-tech blog, I just wrote whatever came to mind. If you find something that I should improve on, please feel free to DM me.