Author: ican

Last weekend we saw first WordCamp in Nagpur, it is beginning of many of the WordCamps coming up this year in India.

I was one of the speaker at WordCamp Nagpur and talked about alternate development techniques on WordPress, ie how you can do lot of common things without writing code.

2nd session started by @thecancerus Job isn't just to write a code @wcnagpur #WCNagpur pic.twitter.com/QLZFIDj9uc

— Vishal Mukadam (@vishalmukadam) June 25, 2017

I liked how WordCamp Nagpur had planned it’s event, with day one about workshops with three parallel tracks and special emphasis on community & contribution, while day two about talks with clear focus on users and developers.

I specifically learned three new things during the event

1. Using wp-cli to take database backups and import, during Ajit Bohra’s Workshop.
2. Using Composer for managing WordPress projects in git during Rahul’s talk.
3. Using WordPress REST API during Tushar’s talk.

This was also the WordCamp where I went full selfie mode

Being in Nagpur meant eating Saoji, and on both days we went out for lunch to try a new Saoji restaurant, though sweets I will try next time

It was two days full of fun and learning, and I would like to thank all the organizers of WordCamp Nagpur for all the hard-work they did to host such an awesome event.

Last month we finally witnessed the first ever WordCamp in South India organised by Bigul M and Hari Shanker and rest of the members of Kochi WordPress meetup group.

I can say that they managed to match the expectations set by WordCamp Udaipur, and three cheers for all the organisers and volunteers for making it happen.

This was first WordCamp where almost everyone stayed till the end of the day, generally, most of the attendees start leaving by tea break or about 3.30 PM. At WordCamp Kochi, I was both a Volunteer and Speaker. I volunteered at happiness bar along with Gagandeep and talked about building MVP with WordPress.

I talked about why to build MVP with WordPress, and how to do so without writing single line of PHP code, I gave example of ask.careers, one of the WPoets continuous improvement program customer, who had come to us for building a mobile app and  how they built their MVP with WordPress and validated their idea even before releasing and the mobile app to play store.

Here are slides from my talk at WordCamp Kochi.

https://www.slideshare.net/teamphp/building-minimal-viable-product-mvp-with-wordpress

I attended few sessions of which three sessions stand out for me. First one by Vivek Jain, he talked about handling clients the human way,  a summary of his talk can be seen on below tweeter thread. The highlight of his talk was LED ( Lead, Empathise and Document) way.

.@svivekjain is talking about handling client in human way.. pic.twitter.com/T36kYRvw1I

— WPoets (@wpoets) February 19, 2017

Next one was by Mahangu he talked about support first, I had missed this talk at Kathmandu WordCamp last year. One of the main takeaway from his talk was that we should cost and charge for support, as customer service gives an edge to companies. His talk was filled with gems if you provide support.

Finally, the talk by Daphnée was also an eye opener for me. She shared her experience as a remote worker, and my takeaway was the role of documentation and right internal communication tools in enabling remote work. This was later augmented by the LED way suggestion by Vivek.

I also received the gift from Bluehost for winning their selfie contest in Udaipur

I stayed a day extra, had a great time with my friends Premanshu and Abhishek and roamed the Kochi city, we managed to catch an Elephant bathing in the river. Nithin was our guide for the first day and Abhilash arranged for a driver on the second day.

We also tried a large variety of Keralite food

I am looking forward to next edition of WordCamp Kochi, which I will definitely attend with family.

I attend my last WordCamp of 2016 at Kathmandu, where I had an opportunity to talk about my pet topic of being able to assemble a website/ web application the way we could assemble a desktop application. Here is the video of that talk and I am open to your suggestions about how to make it the default way for building websites.

Here are few things that I personally liked about WordCamp Kathmandu, that we can emulate here in India

1. Start On Time:  To ensure that they start on time, they had opened the collection of tickets and swags a day before for attendees, this ensured that on the day of event, instead of waiting in the line they were ready for talks.
2. All day Swag Counter: They allowed attendees to collect their swag through out the day, so attendees were able to collect their swag without queuing and most importantly they could spend time attending and networking.
3. Multitrack & breaks: They had timed the breaks between the talks for allowing people switch between the talk and tracks.
4. One Big Family: This is another thing that liked about the community, almost every one knew every one. That 200+ people we are talking about. WordCamp Kathmandu was almost like one big happy family reunion.
5. Plan for Next WordCamp: Even before this years WordCamp was over they had already planned for next years WordCamp and responsibility distributed.

All in all this was the first WordCamp that I have attended that started on time, was running fully on autopilot, every member of team knew whats needs to be done and was doing it. Being one of the organizers of upcoming WordCamp Pune, I had lot to learn, and hope to apply them to ensure we have smoothest running WordCamp in Pune.

Kudos to all the organizers and volunteers for WC Kathmandu

I also want to specifically thank my friends Biplab and Roshan for showing me Kathmandu.

I had though that this years WordCamp Mumbai was the by far best WordCamp India has seen, but WordCamp Nashik changed my views. Now, India has seen two great WordCamps, and set a high bar for all upcoming ones.

Here’s quick list of things that I liked about WordCamp Nashik 2016,

1. Happiness Bar, it was first time any WordCamp in India actually thought about putting it, even though every WordCamp has seen users coming to get their problems solved. Even I am guilty of not thinking about it while organizing last two WordCamps in Pune.
2. Community Bar, it was another first from WordCamp Nashik, they had dedicated space for people too discuss how they can get involved in local WordPress community. I hope every Indian WordCamp will have these two bars setup, I am going to ensure that at least Pune WordCamp will have it.
3. Networking Area, they had a spacious networking area compared to WordCamp at Mumbai and Pune, while the networking area was very much part of the venue, they utilized it well by putting enough round tables and chairs.
4. Introducing New Speakers, they had about 60% first time speakers, that is a great feat in itself, considering they were organizing for the first time and very few will take the risk with new speakers, from the feedback I had received it had payed off.
5. Focus of giving the best to Sponsors, setting up of sponsor desks around networking area was a great idea that allowed sponsors to get the best of WordCamp. I saw that almost all of them were happy with the attention they received from attendees. This again boils down to choice of venue, but the way they had set it up made all the difference 👍

I missed out almost all the talks expect the one by Saurav on marketing lessons he had learned, so I will skip commenting on talks  at Nashik WordCamp.

Organizing an event like WordCamp takes a lot of efforts, but it has some long term benefits, I have written about my experience of organizing similar event, and Sanjeev has written about his experience in the hope that other will benefit from it.

Three cheers for all the organizers and volunteers who made WordCamp Nashik such a memorable event.

One more thing, straight from the grapevine, I have heard that in 2017 India will host anywhere between 5-7 WordCamps, though not all of them are confirmed.