~vijaykumar

PyCon India is a volunteer run conference, and each year a team of volunteers make the event happen. As a volunteer driven conference, every small contribution is significant. But the conference itself happens because a few people vouch to see to it that the conference happens, come what may. This is the organizing team.

The members of PyCon India 2019, organizing team were brought together by mutual respect of each other, and I am glad to have worked shoulder-to-shoulder with this highly skilled team. I am highlighting some of the contributions made by the team members, but what you see here is just the tip of the iceberg.

Abhishek Yadav is one of the organizers for Chennai.rb and Chennai JS meetup groups. In most other cities, these would be opposing groups / factions, but not Chennai. He frequents Chennaipy, and I had been at Chennai.rb a couple of times. Before 2018, the two of us would call each other from time to time, and mull around the idea of doing a conference in Chennai. Finally, we got to do PySangamam 2018, and we followed it by PyCon India 2019. Abhishek Yadav along with Naren lead the CFP effort of the conference.

Abhishek Yadav is @h6165 on Twitter.

Abishek Mishra is a regular member at the Chennaipy meetups. My first encounter with him, was when he was stranded at the meetup venue, and I dropped him at a nearby bus-stop. At that time, it did not occur to me that we grow-up to support the conference. When we started work for PyCon India, I found him to be extremely energetic and he was offering support in whatever ways he can. He went on to play a significant role, in getting sponsors, writing the sponsor’s handbook, promoting the conference, etc. When we had trouble with accommodating, multiple-tracks within the venue, he suggested the idea of silent conferencing.

Abishek Mishra is @StalwartCoder on Twitter.

Babusubashchandar is a colleague at the company I work for, Zilogic Systems. An engineer by profession and a designer at heart, Babu originally did pretty much the design work for PySangamam and went on to support PyCon India 2019, with T-Shirt printing, and provided design support for the notebooks, bag design, banners, standees and photography.

Babusubashchandar is @babuenir on Twitter.

Gokul is again from HydPy, who had offered to support us for PyCon India 2019. He was incharge of the ticketing platform, and the registration desk. He did an excellent job of handling the crowd, managing T-Shirt distribution and managing the registration desk, for both the conference and the workshops.

Gokul is @gokul369 on Twitter.

Narendran is a regular speaker at Chennaipy. He is now professional speaker touring multiple conferences around the world, doing talks. Along with Abishek Yadav, he led the CFP effort for PyCon India 2019, reviewing proposals and providing feedback, and helping people improve their proposal.

Narendran is @DudeWhoCode on Twitter.

Rajkumar is from Trichy and incidentally is from my alma mater, NIT Trichy. We first got introduced outside college, when he had travelled all the way from Trichy to Chennai, to attend the Chennaipy meetup. As part of the promotion workgroup, Rajkumar had been interacting and working with college students, to promote the event. He had also contributed to badge design and printing, certificate design, banner design and handling the poster session.

Rajkumar is @rajkumartreads on Twitter.

Ramanathan belongs to the Hyderabad Python User Group, and I first met him, when I did a workshop for PyConf Hyderabad. After that HydPy went on to run PyCon India 2018. During the conference, Ram encouraged me to take up PyCon India 2019, and he was willing to offer his support. I was reluctant at that point, because the scale of the conference looked huge and I was not very sure if we would be able to do it.

We eventually went on to take up PyCon India 2019, and Ram provided tremendous support in execution of the conference. His encouragement and support, during hard-times, and guidance for important decisions were key to building the the conference. Ram was also instrumental in negotiation with sponsors, allowing us to bring-in the required income for running the conference.

Ram is @ramanathanhari on Twitter.

Rengaraj was an ex-colleague at the company I work for, Zilogic Systems. He has always been supportive and very concerned about Chennaipy, ever since I took over as the its organizer. He immensely contributed to promoting PyCon India 2019. Rengaraj also acted as a watchdog, monitoring the CFP, ticketing platform and website, and would be the first to notice when anything goes wrong. He also offered excellent hospitality to the keynote speakers, and ensured their travel and stay was pleasant.

Rengaraj is @sakthirengaraj on Twitter.

Senthil, AKA Stylesen is a Debian Developer, who maintains various Python packages for the Debian project. He had contributed to the sponsorship effort of PySangamam, and lead the sponsorship effort for PyCon India 2019. His systematic working style helped us to manage and cater to the vast portfolio of sponsors, for PyCon India 2019. He was also instrumental in getting the CTC venue booked.

Senthil is @stylesen on Twitter.

Sharmila is a regular attendee at the the Chennaipy meetups. When we contacted her to lead the diversity workgroup, she readily agreed. She along with the support of volunteers, helped out with the reaching out to more women speakers, helped in crafting and implementing the accessibility guidelines, arranging for childcare and PyLadies lunch.

Sharmila is @sharmi1a on Twitter.

Shrayas Rajagopal has been instrumental in shaping Chennaipy to what it is today. I first met him as a speaker at ILUGC, and then we was a regular speaker at the Chennaipy meetups. He was also instrumental in making PySangamam happen. He joined the bandwagon, little late for PyCon India 2019, and took care of the video recordings, and chaired one of the conference tracks.

Shrayas is @shrayasr on Twitter.

Sivasubramanyam is the organizer of the Chennai Astronomy Club. My first encounter with Siva was when he suggested an improvement to the Chennaipy website, where he corrected the color of the Twitter logo. He sure had an eye for design and perfection. As part of the design workgroup, he was instrumental in refining the logo design, maintaining the website and creating social media posters and other artwork.

Siva is @sivaSupermanyam on Twitter.

Thanks team, for making PyCon India 2019 happen! It was a pleasure working each one of you. I hope there will be more opportunities for us to work together in the future.