Indian Web Community Leaders Summit 2019 #iwcls | Highlights
Google invited 50 Ecosystem influencers, GDE’S and Community organisers to its offices in Bangalore and also Googlers from chrome, web and Design team from around the world to come together and discuss the things that can drive the future of web community in India forward.
I was also invited to represent AMP opensource Community.
Google has always tried to do something innovative by giving equal opportunity to new people trying to join opensource as well as bring expertise from around the world that can make significant changes to the web.
India Web community leaders Summit 2019 #iwcls was organised in keeping the following things in mind -
- Hear out the issues and problems that community leaders are facing.
- Discuss together solutions to major problems
- Discuss key trends and insights about the web
- Network and bring together different web communities in India
- Have a wonderful time with Googlers and get answeres.
Keynote
The Day started with a keynote from one of the Google DevRel speaking about how much web is growing especially in India and how developers play a key role in this. With a networking activity, we quickly got to know the cool facts about each other and also how important they were to this summit.
Before the event, all the attendees were asked to come with the challenges that they think were mostly faced when running the community. And that’s what was the agenda for the next discussion.
Community Lead: Technical Leader or Program Manager
We discussed what matters the most for leading a community where everyone shared their own stories and experiences. In most of the cases, a person starts with technical expertise and then becomes more modular to a managing kind of role or vice — versa. There are no actual answers to this but for sure there needs to be a balance of both and ultimately the team effort can never be compared with the individual.
Women In Community
Also, we discussed the common problem that women face in community programs that could be a reason for the less turnout ratio. Women tech makers in the room felt that it's often due to uncomfortableness in bieng in minority in such events and that’s why women-specific events drive them out. To solve this, one solution could be to promote women speakers so as to bring more gender-equal audience.
Open Source Contributions
Communities have been the key drivers of open source. But at the same time, a very frequently asked question among beginners is how they can start opensource and there are many ways to do it. It can be translations, documentation, learning material, speaking, Code PR’s, Bugs/features and endless other things. Communication is the most important thing in open source and communities are the common ground for developers.
Fun Night in Google’s way
Like other Google events, IWCLS night was also an amazing one. From Karaoke to Bhangra we got blended in and fun-filled.
Also, we heard out success stories from 2 community leads and how they have been doing great stuff using the web to conserve the environment.
State of Web
On the following day, we got into the actual business that is the web. Yohan (web developer advocate) introduced to us the state of the web and how it has seen key growth in some years. We saw how various technologies have risen in the years and also other country-specific statistics.
Paul ( Chrome DevRel ) introduced to us some key insights and upcoming cool things to the chrome and PWA’s. FileSystem API, SMS API and Lighthouse CLI bieng the favourite one. He also brought up the latest MDN survey that showed the common problems faced by developers and what could be done to fix them.
Then we had a live feedback session with googlers where we discussed our problems/queries and also came up with the suggestion that can improve web platform.
We also got to know 2 other community project one the platform that is bringing the communities together and others that are enabling VR/AR in Web.
Material Design
Googles Material Design team was also present in the summit who gave a quick introduction to design systems and templating and got suggestions and feedback from the attendees.
The Google Stardom
The event couldn’t have been more amazing after seeing many more star googlers that came especially to hear out the Indian web community and filled us with the energy to do more amazing stuff.
Conclusion
The summit delivered what it was intended for and that is to close up the gap between the web community and Google. Google has been investing in opensource and community than never before and holding summit like IWCLS is a way to keep in check the direction. For me, it was quite amazing to experience to get closer to the opensource community and Google and I am really excited about what it has to bring next.
