WordCamp Bhopal 2016

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This is the first time, I have organised a WordCamp (WordCamp Bhopal 2016). I learned a lot, so I thought about sharing my experience. ?
This was one of the best day in my life, as i had many responsibilities on the day as the lead organizer of WordCamp Bhopal 2016. I had a good team of organisers and volunteers including Animesh Jain, Gaurav Tiwari, Sachin Artani, Udit Jain, Yash Kumar Hemnani, Raj Tiwari, Shreya Singh, Arpita Vishwakarma, Shubham Agrawal, Deepansh Gupta, Minesh Chandel, Rishabh Chandrayan, Raj Nilayam, Amisha Jain, Tanay Saraf who really helped me and without them the event could not get this event a huge success.

 

The day started at 5’o clock, I checked my WhatsApp and Facebook, where I saw Saurabh Shukla’s message that he reached Bhopal around 3, I called Gaurav to get in touch with him where I came to know he is already with him and were enjoying. Then about 6.30 animesh and Saurabh arrived to pick me up and we left for our venue, Lakshmi Narayan College of Technology, Bhopal.

We were provided with very good rest house for our speakers from the venue sponsor (LNCT) to get freshen up, where we went and checked out the things, Vidit Sharma from the team went to pick the other speakers from Airport. We were arranging flexes and other things at the venue and slowly all the speakers were there at the venue, we asked all the speakers and sponsors to move to the guest house to get freshen up and made the other preparations.

 

At 8.45 attendees started to reach the registration desk, we asked them to please revisit the registration desk at 9’o clock, then Animesh Jain took the responsibility of the registration and distributing kits with Udit Jain. The online attendance was taken by Sachin Artani at the registration desk, the best part was that, the registration process was smooth and got ended up on time, we had breakfast at the same time.

 

The next great thing was we had an awesome auditorium with capacity of around 2000 people, to accommodate only 300 attendees we did block the side rows and made all to sit in the middle row and made the speakers and sponsors to sit in the front so that anyone can recognise and interact with them, we had 3 sponsor tables outside the auditorium, one for our proud Gold Sponsor rtCamp, next for our awesome silver sponsor MilesWeb and the third was for our wifi sponsor Bangon where the team of respective company sat and interacted with the people.

Starting of the event:

The event started with the lightning of lamp by director of training & placements, LNCT group of Institutes along with all the speakers of WordCamp Bhopal.

 

Everything was planned and went great and suddenly a glitch.

 

The projector issue.. the projector suddenly stopped working and everything was rushing in a strain, we tried many things, then the speakers and team members from WordCamp Mumbai and WordCamp Pune namely Rahul Bansal, etc tried everything we could, in all we were delayed for about 1 hour and then the saviour came into action Mr. Vachan Kudmule he brought his portable ZTE projector along with him and he connected it and we started with the the first session by Puneet Sahalot on Introduction to WordPress.
Immediately we called a projector on rent but that was taking time so Tanay Saraf with Vidit Sharma went to a store and brought a projector in less than an hour, finally we had 3 projectors with us which made me feel relaxed, that was the one and only glitch in the whole event which was resolved asap!

I requested all speakers to cut down their session by just 5 mins to cover the event timings, We had speaker sessions until 11.30 and then there was a 10 mins break for all to have a breakfast which included sandwich, tea, coffee and samosa :D, the break was extended to 15 mins instead of 10 and then we again started the sessions.

 

We had Aditya’s session on Why choose a career in open source (WordPress), then we had Nirav’s session on Why We Indian Developers Fail… And what you can do about it.., and then a session by Rahul onBuilding high quality WordPress agency in India!

The Lunch Break:

We had a lunch break at 2:00 PM behind the auditorium, in the lunch time a great number of people interacted with speakers and sponsors which made me feel great to know the enthusiasm in Bhopalis about WordPress.

Interaction of attendees with Rahul Bansal in the lunch time

 

The Second Half

Just after the lunch we had a panel discussion on “how do WordPress agencies hire” by Rahul Bansal, Amit Singh, & Nirav Mehta and which was moderated by Saurabh Shukla which seek attention of the attendees to the WordPress companies and how they can be benefited from it and ended up the sessions by Saurabh’s awesome session. Mistakenly i tagged Aditya Kane instead of Nirav Mehta (apologies).

 

I finally took privilege to come over the stage and thank all the speakers, sponsors and attendees to come and making the event a huge success, also i announced about the WordPress Bhopal meetup venue given by LNCT group of Institutes.

The Speaker Dinner:

 

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