A story originally meant to be published to the Google Developers Medium Blog

Do you remember your first experience developing software? It’s a magical feeling. Websites, applications no longer seem like a black-box - you have some idea of how they were built, and now you want to build something that can make an impact on the world.

That was my experience when I first picked up software development. And it’s a common sentiment. But, being a developer is a test of continued learning - you will not know everything. Hence, to create truly amazing things, you need to have a community that you can rely on. That’s why we have the Developer Student Clubs.

There was no active GDSC at Imperial College London. Hence, my co-leads and I wanted to build an active, thriving and inclusive community of developers. Imperial has plenty of engineers and scientists - many of whom were interested in software engineering and data science. Thus, GDSC Imperial was reborn.

As a Team, we drafted a vision to inspire an interest amongst all students, including those without a computing background, in Software Engineering and Data Science. We wanted to teach and get people excited about technology, such as Cloud and AI, so that they can build meaningful products using domain knowledge from their primary degrees as well as products in pursuit of social good through Solutions Challenge and in support of non-profits and charities.

And we were off. From then on, we organised a huge Kick-Off event with a crowd of >70 students where we shared our vision and got them excited about Google tech. We launched our workshop series - Introduction to Software Engineering and Introduction to Machine Learning, where we guided students over 12 sessions. We organised a social with LSE GDSC to connect our members so that they could share insights. We helped to bring in startups, academics, and Google Developer Experts to share about their experiences. And we put together Imperial’s first student-led AI Summit, in collaboration with industry, college societies and academic groups. We grew to over 370 members in a span of three months, and are now in the College Union’s incubator programme for new societies.

Now, we’re looking towards inspiring our community to participate in Solutions Challenge and developing software for a local charity to support them in volunteer management and engagement. We’re also lucky to have the support of local GDGs - such as GDG Cloud London - in the organisation of our programmes.

But, as I mentioned earlier, there were plenty of bumps along the way. Let me share with you what we had learnt from them.

It is always about the Community

Having more interconnections within your community acts as a multiplier to the effectiveness of your programmes. People will be incentivised to participate, connect and learn from one another if they have more opportunities to make friends and network with other members. This creates a flywheel effect where as your community grows and people become more engaged, more individuals would be interested in joining. Something we had noticed was that despite the lineup of our programmes, more could have been done to connect our members. We focused a lot on skills-based development and industry engagement, but left comparatively less time for socials and meetups. While we had a Discord Channel, it was used mainly for announcements. As we incorporate our learnings into the new year, it serves as an important reminder that the first line item of any community builder’s job description is to build the community.

Focus on individual engagement first, then numbers

As professionals in technology, we should be data-driven in sensing and decision-making. As a community builder, we often want to understand how well we are doing. We may be tempted to use the size of our community as the main metric for this - but it should not be the sole barometer. Rather, we should focus on the level of engagement achieved for the individuals that attend our events. This means that even if only 5-10 people attend your event, as long as you know that they were engaged (either through asking for feedback or by inspection), you are a successful community builder. Despite the dip in numbers attending our events over time, we still felt successful as those that attended were highly engaged.

It is important to reflect

Organising a large number of events in a short span of time was challenging, but we had also learnt a great deal. We put in effort to understand how each event can be better than the previous one and looked at this from the angle of an attendee. This means starting on time, understanding the AVA setup, conducting quick rehearsals and so on. Strategically, this also means thinking about how the next Core Team in 23-24 can put together a better strategy and set of events to achieve the organisational objectives - and writing this down so that they know.

We have been through a long and difficult journey, but the memories made it worth it. One key highlight would definitely be DevFest London 2022, where we attended as a team and met others in the Google Developers community. As Leads, we were very lucky to have an amazing core team that we could rely on to help organise our events.