I always believe that community should be a comfortable place for the members. Then when the members already feel comfortable, that’s when we can learn, collaborate, and grow together. So far I have held 3 events in my campus, 2 workshops (Android for Beginner) and 1 internal forum. In between the workshops and internal forum, I opened a recruitment for Google DSC ITB community members. The response I got was superb, during the recruitment period which is 3 days, 200++ students had filled the application form. I doubted if I could embrace all the students and make sure this program could meet their expectations and finally leverage their skill so they could contribute to society. At first I thought I should just select few students to be the members but then I reminded of this program’s goals that this is open to any students, so I decided to accept all the students who applied. I also did a radio broadcast in one of my campus’ radio station, I talked about Google DSC program so more people in my campus and Bandung area would know about Google DSC program.
Beside the core team, I created facilitator team that would help me do the workshop to make sure every students have understood the materials. For the workshops, it went smoothly although not so many people came because of my fault in publication (I published the workshop detail in less than a week before the workshop). After the workshop, I asked them to fill the feedback form, and most of them said that the workshop period (4 hours) was really short. I was really glad to know they were enjoying the workshop and asked for more!
As for the internal forum, I held it because I want to create a strong bond between the members. There were 3 sessions for the forum, Google DSC Program Exposure Session, Networking Session, and Discussion Session. I explained about the program’s focus and main agenda on the first session. After that, I asked the students to shuffle their seats and form a group with people around them. I gave them 15 minutes to introduce themselves to the group and talk about their passion in IT development. Next, to the most exciting session, discussion session. In this session I showed them the schedule for the next events until June 2018 on Google Calendar. There will be web and android workshop, seminar, internal forum, and tech talk. Then I asked for their advice about the events I had planned. Their ideas and passions were really beyond my expectations. Many of them are really passionate in Machine Learning, so they suggest machine learning seminar and workshop to be held. Even in the end of the forum, one of the students came to me and said that he is willing to be the facilitator for machine learning workshop if needed! Not only that, for the second half of 2018, one of the students suggested that we should start to solve real problems with real projects. So the members would be divided into several teams then handle different projects based on their interest. It was a really great idea! We also create a chat group after the internal forum. We did lot of things in the chat group such as tech discussion (e.g Kotlin vs Java), sharing about learning resources, tech events, competitions, etc. I am glad we are a lot more comfortable with each other now.