OpenSocial Developer Garage Pune 08 was big hit

OpenSocial Developer Garage (ODG) that happened on 20 Dec, achieved its objective of spreading awareness about OpenSocial. As one of the organizer, one day before, I reached at venue for doing arrangement. There was a great enthusiasm among all volunteers and quickly all finished the arrangements. Soon big posters also reached at the venue and they were amazing. Great job by Amit.

I woke up at early morning as I have to pick up Aravind, one of the speaker from Airport. Anyways it was sleepless night with thoughts of ODG moving around in brain. When I reached at venue everything was almost set. Registrations were started. Volunteers Uday,Kapil, Swati were there even before me. Rohan set environment right by displaying ODG banner on screen using my laptop. Speakers were at event on time. Thanks to Rajdeep,Anash, Shishir, sun guys for their participation.

We were almost 1 hour late to start the event because of late comers and some technical glitch with speakers arrangement. We skipped initial formalities and started with talk of Rajdeep from Google.

Rajdeep nicely introduced all with OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a development platform advocated by Google using which you can create applications for many sites like Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Plaxo, Ning etc. I liked session by Shishir about optimizing your Orkut application for better performance.

At one room codelab was going on with full enthusiasm. They were developing Orkut application for and NGO called India-I-care. Most of it is developed by the end of day. By the time they got ready to present it in front of all, I took that as an opportunity to present my session on “OpenSocial vs Facebook”. Speakers were given a nice gift of “bamboo shoots” at the end.
(incomplete :has to yet write about Sun’s session)

Top 5 benefits I got out of this event

i. Chance to learn advanced concepts of OpenSocial.
ii. Got good friends like Rajdeep, Aravind, Shirin and Shishir.
iii. Added one more experience to arrange free event for developers.
iv. Chance to work with all other organizers and volunteers.
v. Added one more joyful day to my life and many snaps to preserve

What we could improve next time -
i. Not limiting registrations max count. Lets as much of them come and participate.
ii. Finalize on speakers (if we have to) at very first day rather than keep it doing for many days.
iii. Start marketing early and take rest at last few weeks.
iv. Finalize on sponsors as soon as possible.

Big guys who helped to make this event successful :-