It was always fascinating to me when I used to hear or read about WordCamp experiences from people.
So when I first came across a Facebook post for the WordPress Mumbai Meetup for January, I got excited. It wasn’t hard to hit the “Going” button in a matter of minutes after I checked out the time & venue of the meetup.
Oh and if you are wondering about what food item that is in the above image, it’s a “Paper Dosa”. Dosa is a south-indian dish and a Dosa is usually 1/3rd the size of what you see in above image. The meetup was over these Paper Dosas at the Udupi Vihar restaurant in Goregaon.
The Journey
If you are travelling in a train in Mumbai on a Sunday, you would have enough people telling you about the uncomfortable travel experiences due to the routine Sunday maintenance (Mega Block, Jumbo Block, etc.) of the Indian Railways. After running for about 10 minutes on my way to the venue, I was able to reach there 10 minutes late.
My first thoughts
When I reached, I saw 3 people sitting in a corner. I recognized that this is the meetup group courtesy the photo of the organizer: Alexandar Gounder on the Facebook group. My first thought was: Is this a meetup?
After a quick round of handshakes & introductions, that was my first question: Is this how a meetup is like usually? Like 3-4 people only? The answer was ‘Yes, at times it is like this.’. I was a little surprised.
Gradually, as we started talking, people started to join in. As we continued talking & listening to each other, I started to like it.
Enriching Experience
Particularly interesting was the fact that people from various fields were present. Someone was a Tech Journalist, someone about to start an Ecommerce site selling hiking gear, someone into developing WordPress plugins & so on.
It was an amazing experience to learn about so many new things in WordPress. Things like InstaMojo, art of negotiating shipping deals for ecommerce businesses, last year’s wordcamp, ROI of plugin reviews (paid & free reviews) and much more.
There is so much more to WordPress than it meets the eye.
The most important thing was a sense of eagerness amongst people wanting to meet & help each other. Whether it’s managing time from your day job to get the event booking for the next WordCamp up & ready, or if it’s just as simple as travelling for 1.5 hours to reach the meetup venue on a Sunday afternoon.
WordCamp Mumbai
Everyone was interested in finding out the plans for WordCamp Mumbai to be held on March 15,16 2014.
Who are the speakers, the sponsors, the guidelines, the fees and much more – all of it was discussed briefly. More details about it will be available in the coming days.
It was great to be part of a bigger community & meeting new people. Looking forward to the WordCamp & to the next Meetup.
You can find some more details about the meetup here.
You could also join in the Facebook group of WordPress India to keep yourself posted on the WordCamp Mumbai & other updates.
Nice one! Yes, the meet-ups are a little unstructured but I have found that such lack of structure often gives everyone something to speak about and its not just dominated by 1-2 people….
Personally being not very social, I like the free wheeling discussions that take place. Glad you liked this meetups and hope to see you add more to future meetups. The more the merrier I would say.
Agree totally on the unstructured setting of meetups. That’s what makes them so good to have. The discussions are helpful in more ways than one can ever imagine.
Would do my best to contribute to meetups in future too. 🙂