PRAKASH MURTHY: Good evening, everyone!
AUDIENCE: [mumbling, speaking] Good evening!
P.M.: I see the energy has sapped totally. We
are at the end of the conference and there's...
At least that's how I am feeling. Am...
AUDIENCE: [indecipherable]
P.M.: OK. Good evening everyone!
AUDIENCE: Good evening!
P.M.: Yay! All right, do you- so, are you
ready for the last session of the Garden City
Ruby Conference 2014?
AUDIENCE: Yeah!
P.M.: Yes! So let me start by this thing.
This happened the day before the conference,
and I haven't processed all the
things that have happened in the last two days,
but I feel like this is the best thing
for, from my perspective in the last, in this
conference. First off, we have already fixed this problem.
There are, there are no longer one Ruby conferences
in India. There are - how many?
AUDIENCE: Two!
P.M.: Two Ruby conferences in India now. But I,
I was really kind of shocked when Chad said
that. Yeah, in the US it was like that,
in fact in the whole world it was like
that. In fact, there was no Ruby conferences ever,
and then somebody said let's make one happen. So
Chad and a few others joined together and did
the first RubyConf in the US. And I was
surprised learn that it was, it had only thirty-one
participants. 2001. In Tampa. And now, this year's RubyConf
in Miami had around 500 participants. So it's grown
all like that over the last twelve years. I
find it heartening because we are at that stage,
where they were back in 2001 and 2002. We
can learn from them and get, butt ahead in
the next couple of years. So, so this is
what I have planned for this talk. I was
not supposed to be here. My plan for this
conference was to be spending all the time with
my beautiful daughter and leave the team, team to
take care of everything. And everything was going fine.
In fact, two m- last two months I haven't
been on the mailing list as well. I let
the team take care of everything and I was
just, once in awhile, say what's up, what's happening.
But today, we lost one of our keynote speakers,
and so that was a major crisis. I didn't
want to leave it on the team. So I
came here, and I'm here, and I'm on stage
giving this talk. With not much preparation, I thought
it's maybe a good idea to just share about
how we came to be here. How this whole
Garden City Ruby thing happened. You guys interested in
learning more about Garden City Ruby?
AUDIENCE: Yes. Yeah.
P.M.: OK. Let's begin at, from the very beginning.
In the beginning there was nothing. Let's see, let's
see... yes. In the beginning there was nothing, then
on June 29th, 2013, I sent email to the
Bangalore Ruby user group, saying hey, let's do a
conference. This was a week after last, this year's
RubyConf India in Pune, where I gave a talk
about taking Indian Ruby community to the next level.
There I talked about essentially what Satir?? [00:04:43] talked
about in his community lightning talk. We need more
meet ups, we need more conferences. Afterwards, I got
a lot of good feedback. A lot of people
came up to me and said, hey, you inspired
us, we are going to do a meetup in
Mumbai. We are going to do a meetup in
Kochi or whatever. Nobody really talked about doing a
conference. So I said, OK, you know what, let
me show it by example how it is done,
and I started this project. This mail got an
amazing response. Around fifteen, twenty people responded on the
Bangalore Ruby usergroup saying hey, we are interested. We
want to help you. So, thanks to the Bangalore
Ruby user group for that kind of amazing response.
Next. So that's when it started. And the very
first thing I focused on was to get the
keynote speakers. As somebody was pointing out to me
earlier, if we have the key, one or two
keynote speakers, well-known keynote speakers in the line-up, it
becomes very easy to sell the conference to others.
And the first person I approached to was Chad,
and Chad enthusiastically said, yes, I'm coming to Bangalore.
I want to be in Bangalore. And, yeah, I
was telling Chad yesterday, I attribute 80% of the
success of this conference to him. Because of him
being here, a lot of people decided to come
here. We got a lot of sponsors to pay
up. He says I'm, you know, I'm wrong, but
I believe, at least, if not 80, 79%. Yeah.
We got the keynote speakers lined up. Now that
one, one other point I want to make here.
We can't keep having Chad come here every time
we want to have a conference. So we need
more Indian Chad Fowlers. So we need more of
the people sitting here to be up here a
lot of times, and make a name for themselves,
so that when you go to another place, or
some city to give a talk, people pay to
come and see you. So we'll get there in
a couple of years. Who wants to take up
that challenge? Nice. Nice to see a few hands
go up. The next thing I want to talk
about is the first, the organization behind this conference.
So when I first started talking about this conference,
my original idea was that we'll go with ITT.
ITT is the entity which puts up RubyConf India.
They have done a phenomenally good job of organizing
four annual Ruby conferences in India. And you already
heard from Ajay in the morning about the background
of those conferences. Very soon in the process I
realized that may not work out for me, or
at least, what I was trying to accomplish. If
we had gone with ITT, it would mostly have
been, again, Ajey, Gautam and a few others doing
most of the work, or taking most of the
key decisions. And there's no - it would just
be another RubyConf India. I wanted a totally new
team to come up, learn from scratch how to
do all this. How to do, get sponsors, how
to put up a program, how to organi- do
all the logistics stuff required for setting up a
good conference. So I decided in the very beginning,
OK, not, we are not going to go with
ITT. We are going to start a- we'll have
a new, non-profit entity created. And so maybe, it
took us awhile to get there, but two months
later I think we had our trust. So these
are the six trust members. So among the organizing
team, it's me and Tejas who are not on
the trust, for different reasons. Everyone else is on
the trust, and yeah. The one hour of time,
Satish at this point, because he did all the
ground work for finding out what's required to do,
set up a trust. And he is also followed
up on the financial part of it. So big
hand to Satish. Satish over here. So, yeah, that's
probably about the organization part. Then about the talk
selection and, talk proposals and selections. I want to
share this interesting breakdown of all the talk proposals
we got. Total we got seventy-two talk proposals. That's
a good number, given that we had only around
a month's time for call, when the call for
proposal was open. What do you make of this?
Everybody wants to submit a talk at the last
minute. This, actually we- Where's Leena? Come on up
here. Carry the mic for her. Oh, you, yeah.
So Leena had the idea that we should actually
train some of these people who give us a
proposal and then maybe, yeah, we could interact with
them, and then we'll lead much better proposals and
much better talks in this conference. If this happens,
if everybody submits at the last minute, we can't
do much about that. So next time a conference
is announced, please make sure you submit a talk
right at the beginning. We, we, well, I want
this to be reversed. I want more talk proposals
coming at the beginning than at the end. Just,
I have a few questions for you. So I'll
just show a couple of other things. We got
sixty-seven proposals from men and five proposals from women,
and of the five proposals from women, three were
from the same person, and one was a, was
paired with a perso- guy.
LEENA S N: And the-
P.M.: And the last one was, we made, we invited
those two to submit a talk. That was Sakshi
and Pallavi. We told them we need you here
talking, so you need to propose. So really this
was almost non-existant for the number of proposals by
women.
L.S.N.: And that too the three proposals was
not from India- I mean-
P.M.: Again, yeah, that three proposals-
L.S.N.: It was from Emily, Emily from Mongol?? [00:12:26]
P.M.: So the womenfolk in the room here.
Any thoughts of submitting proposals for the next
conference? OK. Let's, let's change this. We got a
lot of proposals from different countries as well. But
ultimately it ended up that none of them could
come. We selected two of the speakers from this,
for, from non, who are not from India, and
both could not come for different reasons, so we
ended up with only Indian speaker line-up, other than
the invited keynote speakers. I was very happy with,
to see this. The breakup from different cities. This
shows that there is room for having meetups and
conferences at each of these cities as well. You
just need to start something there. OK, this is
fine. So Leena. How did we go about talk
selection. What, what happened?
L.S.N.: So, like I'm, like
Prakash mentioned, we wanted to have a lot of
conversation with the submitters, but that didn't happen because
of lots, so many proposals came in. So we
relied on the busyconf rating system, so all, all,
everyone in the, in the organizing committee, they rated
the talks, and we went with the - most
of the time we went with the rating, given
by the, the auto rating given by busyconf as
rated by all the organizers. And we had given
some exceptions. Like the Rails Girls, we thought, OK,
we want them to be talking about how we
ran. Because it's experience important that, that should encourage
others to join these kind of things. So, so
we made some exceptions like that, but mainly it
was the rating given by, given by the organization.
P.M.: So it's these ratings here. Each of the
team members gave a rating and we rated all
the talks. So started ?? from the ?? [00:14:38].
There were a few exceptions, right.
L.N.S.: Yeah, we had, only Rails Girls was the exception.
P.M.: Rails Girls was exception, and I think
Emily also we had to remove one of her talks.
L.N.S.: Yeah, and we also, so Emily's - we, I think
we have, we can pull out the blog post
that we have written. So we also, apart from
the rating, we also decided that we would not
have more than two speakers outside of India, and
we'll have only one speaker from the organizing company-
P.M.: Organizing team, yes.
L.N.S.: Even if it gets
higher rating. And we also decided that we'll not
have two talks from the same person, so that
negated many of them in the top, because Emily's
almost, all talks from Emily got a higher rating.
But we negated those because same speaker, and outside
India. And then we relied on the rating-
P.M.: Yeah.
L.N.S.: And exception was, and apart from those
exceptions, we gave the exceptions to Rails Girls-
P.M.: Rails Girls, yeah.
L.N.S.: Because we, because of the
Rails reason, and I think that was a very
good talk and I think we learned quite a
few things from them, so.
P.M.: And Hermant had
a very good talk proposal and which rated very
high.
L.N.S.: So there was a lot of-
P.M.: And we had to remove him.
L.N.S.: Yeah, there
was a lot of debate on, we had to,
we, among us organizers, we had to, we had
a lot of debates. And that, that talk went
for a couple of calls, and then finally we
decided we'll have only one talk, and Hermant had
two. But Hermant had a very good Panel Discussion-
P.M.: Panel Discussion, yeah.
L.N.S.: And, that I think
was a huge success, so.
P.M.: OK. So. I
want to thank Leena for doing a phenomenal job
with the talk selection and leading everything. Thank you.
You can give it to her. I want to
thank Emil over here for managing the website and
everything related to that. He, he didn't do all
the work, but he got the right people involved
at the right time, and he gave us what
we wanted. The blog featured in the website, it
was amazing. He made it superb. How many of
you know about the opportunities scholarship that we gave
in this conference? Nice. So, Swanand, what's this opportunities
scholarship that we are talking about?
SWANAND PAGNIS: So the opportunities scholarship
is an opportunity for those students
and other underrepresented groups to attend a conference. For
example students, who are studying ?? [00:17:26], who really
want to be a part of the community, talk
to other people, but cannot really afford to travel
all the way to Bangalore, or even for the
conference tickets. Usually conference tickets in India are like
two, three thousand, in that range. For a student
it's a decently steep price. So the idea was
also implemented in RubyConf India. I was one of
the mentors of one of the students, and I
really had fun interacting with them all along, like,
about the month leading to the conference, and on
the conference days itself. So Prakash and I decided
that if the budget allows it we are going
to do the opportunities scholarship here at GCRC, too.
And, well I'll a-
P.M.: This is the list.
S.P.: So this is the list of all the
selected students, and-
P.M.: So where are the scholarship winners?
S.P.: Can all of them please stand up.
P.M.: Can you stand up.
S.P.: All the students.
P.M.: Students! And most of them don't even know
Ruby, they are seeing the Ruby for the first
time, a couple of them are seeing Ruby for
the first time.
S.P.: Tushar here is coming from,
all the way from Jaiper.
P.M.: OK. Thank you.
And, OK. Oh yeah. I missed out some- an
important point here, which we did a lot of
work in figuring out the way to hold this
conference, and making all arrangements: food, logistics, the internet,
everything - all this. Lanyards, t-shirts, all that. Tejas
and Dheeraj- Dheeraj is here? OK, so big hand
to Tejas and Dheeraj, please. So this is what
happened with our registrations. We made that much money
from it, and we had a total of 187
participants register. That included both people who paid for
their tickets and who got complimentary admission. Our aim
was to make it a two hundred people partici-
conference. Keep it very limited - not, RubyConf India,
yeah, has four hundred people. Yeah. I was there
for two days, and I didn't meet a couple
of people I wanted to meet, even though I
was there for two days. It was such big
crowd there. Here I wanted it, to keep it
smaller, two hundred, so that everybody can meet everybody
else. Has that mostly been accomplished? Yeah, 174. OK.
And again, of that, I think that around twelve
or fifteen people didn't show up. So it's about
160 people who have been here for the last
two days.
V.O.: 174
P.M.: 174? Oh great. Oh
that's, you already submitted, removed the number. Great. And,
one other thing I want to show is the,
before I come here. It's in some- one of
these tabs. Yes. This was maybe a day, couple
of days ago that we went through our finances.
We got a total income of around one grand
for forty- oh, forty grand, forty to a thousand.
We started with the idea that we'll have this
fifteen grand event, but, and even with a fifteen
grand budget. We met that target, almost came very,
we came very close to meeting that target, with
the sponsors and ticket sales. And expenses, we, yeah,
it looks like we are just a little bit
below our income, or maybe a little bit over.
We'll know in a couple of days. We had
a couple of last minute expenses come through, so,
but yeah. In this context, I want to thank
all the sponsors. These folks made it really easy
for us to put up an awesome event, and
it was also amazing how easy it was for
us to get the sponsorship. At one point, there
was some doubt that maybe we won't be able
to do it. We won't have enough money, we
won't be able to do - we may have
to cut off a few things. We probably won't
have the opportunities scholarship or maybe not, if not
lunch, at least cut something in the lunch or
whatever. So. All that didn't happen. We could get
all the, the budgeted, the intended amount of money.
So thank you Flipkart, thank you Josh, thank you
Nilenso, thank you GitHub, thank you Qwinix, thank you
ParamiSoft, thank you Bang the Table, thank you MavenHive,
thank you GoodWorkLabs, thank you CodeBrahma, thank you CodeMancers,
thank you Multunus, thank you Mahaswami, thank you SupportBee,
thank you Icicle, thank you Cognitive Clouds, thank you
Big Binary and thank you MaSymbol. Maybe I should
have said yes there, right, to update. MartMe and
StartUp Village in Kochi?? [00:23:33] - they were the
t-shirt sponsors, so thank you MartMe and StartUp Village.
So wow. I covered all ten of the items
I had there. So now. My hope from this
conference is that it will inspire some of you
to go back to your towns and start something
similar there. In that context, what questions do you
have for me and the team here? So I
want all the team members to come up here.
So, questions, questions. OK. Yeah?
QUESTION: So what difference
does having a conference like this have over all
the regular meetups and workshops, and- P.M.: Yeah, who
in the audience can answer him? Yeah. Let's -
let Gautam handle it.
GAUTAM REGE: So the short
answer - the more, the merrier. Right. And the
longer answer to that is that in a larger
conference, you get to meet a lot of other
people, see how they work. See how- which all
companies are interested. See what the other people, what
experience they have. And that's why conferences, people take
time out to come for conferences. Sometimes it happens
in meet ups that, you know, it's an beyond
my job thing.
P.M.: Yeah.
G.R.: So if I
go there, it's OK, if I don't go, then
it's fine. But a conference, you attend. Meet ups
- I'm not sure I'm paid meetups.
P.M.: So-
G.R.: Do we have paid meetups?
P.M.: ?? [00:25:23]
Has Chad Fowler ever covered your meet up? Conference,
we need conference for that. K, next?
QUESTION: I would like to answer his - I would like
to answer his question in one line. It, the
difference between ?? [00:25:43]. People go to ?? [00:25:44],
people don't go to ?? [00:25:47]. So there's the
answer I would give.
P.M.: OK.
QUESTION: Hello. What should be the mindset of a person who is
attending a conference, or what should one expect from
a conference-
P.M.: From a conference.
QUESTION: Or what should one do for a
conference, or, for that matter, a meet up?
P.M.: As a participant or
as an organizer?
QUESTION: As a participant.
P.M.: OK, as a participant, I would say, to make more,
new friends. And to learn new things.
TEJAS DINKAR: All right, does anyone else on the team want
to answer that question as well? Swanand, or ??
[00:26:29]
S.P.: One important thing you need to consider
when you're attending any conference is basically meeting new
people. So the talks and everything is one part
of, obviously they're important. And probably talks, you're gonna
go back home and watch it again on ConFreaks.
It's all being recorded. So the most important thing
is you know meet new people and make new
friends. That is the reason, one of the reasons
why we have reduced the talk period from forty
minutes to thirty minutes, and have increased the lunch
time and the, you know, coffee breaks. So that
people get to talk to each other more. So
that's the reason behind that.
??: Meet new people
or keep meeting your friends at conferences. There are
many people who I only meet at meet ups
or only at RubyConf India or RubyConf.
P.M.: And I meet Coby at every conference I go to.
OK, next question here.
QUESTION: First of all, you
guys did an excellent job of getting this conference
together. I basically have two questions. First is, how
do you raise money from sponsors for a conference
like this? I'm sure it's very difficult. And second
is, how do you get international speakers, like, you
know, Chad, Coby?
V.O.: So I think Swanand wants
to answer this one.
S.P.: You don't raise money
for sponsors. You just ask them, hey we are
putting on a conference, and they just say OK,
we are gonna sponsor, here's the money.
T.D.: Like,
a bit more practically, like this is something I
had a big conversation even with Ajey Gore about
that developed this?? [00:28:03]. You have to understand that
no matter who is there on this board, every
company that sponsors is interested in something else. It
kind of ties into what ?? [00:28:13] was speaking
about in the morning. So I'm just gonna take
my own example, is that we had at Nilenso
are hoping to meet interesting people and eventually bring
on like, hire someone new, and that's why, say,
Nilenso is, that's definitely one of the reasons we
are sponsoring a conference like this. So it's just
to try to get into the mindset of the
person you're speaking to and see what benefits can
you provide them, because like, these, the different levels
of sponsorships - you also have to, we also
have different things that they are allowed to do.
For example, a gold sponsor like Flipkart is allowed
to bring in that large banner back there and
have a booth, and allowed to speak-
P.M.: And they get two minutes.
T.D.: Yeah - and are
allowed to speak to people. A silver sponsor has
their own set of benefits, like giving out something
in the pamphlets, so. It's about going and speaking
to these different organizations, trying to understand what they
are looking for, and seeing how your conference can
help them and vice versa.
??: What Dejas said
just now was exactly what Ajey was saying in
the morning about keeping the stakeholders in the loop.
P.M.: So the other part of your question was
about keynote speakers. I would say it's all about
personal relationships. I knew Chad from before, so I
reached out to him and he said, yes, I
am ready to come. And it helped that he
was in Bangalore before and he wanted to come
back.
??: Actually Coby has a very nice answer
to this question. I was talking to him in
the afternoon. He said, why do we need it?
P.M.: Why do you need it?
??: Why do you always need foreign spekers to come here?
P.M.: Yeah, so. Till we have Indian Chad Fowlers, we
need the real Chad Fowler.
??: So, there you go.
Your goal is set for the next two
years.
QUESTION: I just wanted to ask you [indecipherable
- 00:30:04] at what state do you think the
local meet ups can actually arrange a conference, because
there needs to be a certain mileage or momentum
that needs to be accumulated by the local meet
ups to then, you know, result in a conference.
You just cannot have a big conference right away,
right. So where do you think is the equation
of breakdown should happen?
P.M.: Yeah, so. You want
to answer that? How, how-
??: So what do you mean by big conference, I mean?
QUESTION: [indecipherable - 00:30:35]
T.D.: So how big do you think
that the first RubyConf India was? I don't know.
Actually I don't remember myself, but it was somewhere
around 300 or 350 people.
V.O.: 250 people.
T.D.: 250, is it? We were really, really scared if
we were gonna get about 40 people in that,
in that hall. Because we had, it was completely
untested waters. Like I personally, I think I'm a
bit romantic about this, but I strongly believe in
what, in Ajey said in the morning. It was
really one person's vision. One person wanted to run
a Ruby conference, and everyone else was just kind
of following along with that vision and doing it.
So in reality, the answer to your question was,
well, money aside, it was about 4 to 6
people, that was all that was needed to organize
the first one. And people came. I think, I
think Bangalore definitely India is such a place that,
you put out something, you know, some new technology
like, like we have some obscure, like Go language
conf, next month, just because it's interesting, people will
show up. ??: This may not be the only
way to organize a conference, you know. Everybody's welcome
to figure out their own way. People from ??
[00:31:46] can travel together, and they talk about Ruby
and come back the next day. You know, you
can do your own plans, really.
COBY RANDQUIST: So as far as, do you have to have meet
ups to build up a momentum to hold a
conference. I actually disagree. Because in Bend, it's a
town of about 85,000 people. We had literally twelve
Ruby developers in town, and we started Ruby on
Ales to get, to put Bend on the map
in the Ruby community. So we knew we didn't
have a mass of people there. Now what that
did mean, is we had to go about it
a little bit differently, because we had to do,
you know, more external marketing, and to Prakash's point,
one of the, one of the big advantages of
large conferences, or actually I wouldn't even call this
a large conference, but of conferences in this size,
is that you do get to meet more people.
And you get to create relationships with people, you
know, honestly the reason I'm here is because Prakash
and I talked several years ago at RubyConf in
Loiussiana, and that's really how it came about. You
know, Chad and I's relationship over the years, I
think we've never met anywhere but conferences. I've got
a whole group of, you know, literally hundreds of
friends at this point, that the only time I
ever see each other face to face is at
conferences. Yes. And now I've added another country. So
when you're trying to put together an event, part
of it is make sure you know what you're
trying to accomplish. That's the key part, because if
you know what you're trying to do, then you
can set your limits. And the other key piece
to the budgeting aspect is, always remember you don't
want to dig yourself a hole. You know. So
limit things. With our OpenStack on Ales that I
mentioned yesterday, we basically said, we know what it
costs to rent the place, and if we only
have ten people show up plus our speakers, we're
OK. We know what, we know what our out
of pocket expense is gonna be. But we're not
gonna provide coffee - you know, there's water because
there's water fountains. But we were able to control
those factors. So yeah, you don't, you don't need
a lot of momentum locally. You do need an
interest, or you need to scale your cost model
so that if you only have three people show
up you're OK with it. But, yeah.
T.D.: Also, one more thing I want to say. I would
like everyone to look at the back of the
hall near the Flipkart stall, that's Karen over there.
Everyone wave hi.
P.M.: Hey Karen!
T.D.: So, Karen,
or Jase, as he's known, and is partners of
about I think it's a team of five, have
been running, I think, like a dozen successful tech
events every single year under the banner of HasGeek.
And so if anyone wants to know how to
run a conference successfully and on a different range
of budgets, from like, really big to really small,
please talk to Jase.
P.M.: OK, so. We are almost out of time.
I want to thank all
the, my co-organizers here, and the one last thing
I want to say before closing is, it's not
just the few of us up here who did
this conference. There are a lot of people out,
who helped us from outside. We may not have
time now for everyone, but I want to thank
everyone who helped us put this conference up, and
made it an amazing journey so far. Thank you
everyone.
V.O.: We will see you at RubyConf India in March.