So what is a community?

In one word? Its home. For me at least, Hackerspace PESU-ECC’s Mentor team, GDSC PESU-ECC ‘22 and ACM PESU-ECC had been my “Home” for quite a while. The relentless memes. The insanely enlightening conversations. Learning from almost everyone there. The banter, the inside jokes, everything on that little whatsapp group was fun. It felt like “my people” and I’d often call it home.

But how do you build such a community?

The right people

Starting off with the right people is incredibly important. Nothing great can be accomplished without a great supporting cast. Here I’d like to take the example of Hackerspace PESU-ECC. The key was in how you can make a place feel warm, fun and inviting and also educational. It was fun and frolic for a lot of times, but there were also very very awe inspiring conversations about tech with deeply passionate people. That exact same passion was imbued in me as well.

The environment

Back in the day, Hackerspace mentor was slowly coming into its own. But its only when my Juniors joined did it come alive. We were encouraged by our seniors to speak up and also to voice out what we think, slowly I began to feel like we weren’t just club members. We were friends. They cracked some of the funniest jokes I’ve ever heard and it made me feel comfortable that we weren’t all stuffy and uptight. I felt very comfortable being myself. The environment felt warm and hospitable, receptive, honest and most important: encouraging.

Mentor team was becoming a nice, supportive and safe place for a lot of like minded geeks. There were intense technical debates, lots of copypastas, lots of memes, lots of learning, new perspectives and a lot of exposure to new tech. In essence, even the most shy people had no qualms about letting loose here as it was their safe space, similarly to me it was a place to be myself and share things about my passions.

Working together

Working together is key in forging lasting friendships, shared labour has an effect somehow in how it works in bringing people together. We’ve conducted countless workshops, quite a few hackathons and also recently internal club events like fireside talks. These shared experiences have been a way to facilitate bonding between members.

Keeping it active even if there is no work

Some clubs often just come alive when there is an event to be done. In the case of good Communities there is always some activity of some sort. People either posting memes, sharing articles/blogs or just talking in general, and even going for meetups around bangalore. Recently I’ve had a sort of shift in perspective where I think the metric to be used for measuring how good a club/community is shouldn’t be the amount of events they conduct, but rather how much value they can provide to their own members.

What would be the point of being a part of a club or community if you can’t provide value to your own members?

Concluding

In the end the secret ingredient really is how much of your heart and soul you put into building these communities. Clubs and communities come and go but in the end they always leave their members with good memories and they’d have undergone some level of skill and character development by being a part of the club/community.