Goa has always been like a pilgrimage to me and from my college days it was a dream for me to visit this place. I was sold the moment I heard the name “The Goa Project”. The terms like Unconference and social experiment all added to the excitement.Moreover this is my first attendance to a conference with a speaker pass. I was also excited about meeting a few people whom I only know through twitter and Gmail. Hence the expectations were very high.
My colleague Gopal and I boarded train from Coimbatore along with an exciting youngster Sundaresan who is also a participant. We reached Goa early the next morning. The sun was still not out for me to get the actual view of Goa. As the skies were clearing we hired a taxi and we were on the way to our accommodation.
Sundaresan managed to get an economical accommodation for us which was right next to the Bogmalo beach. We also had other participants staying in the same resort and it did not take much time to get along with those super friendly people.
Mixer:
We had got a special invitation for the Mixer party which was like a get together for the organisers and the speakers with cocktail. Vijay Anand the man behind the Goa project (one of the people who I know only online) was setting the context of unconference by being absolutely unformal in his attire. I was so happy and surprised to see Girish, CEO- FreshDesk, around and this was the first time I was meeting him in person after we did our first Mypromo together. I had got an opportunity to get a real face to face customer feedback and Girish was transparent throughout. I also met Arvind from Zoho and Saravanan from Biztalk who were accompanying Girish. I could see people from Chennai and Coimbatore dominating the numbers in the crowd. It made it feel more like Pondicherry than Goa.
First Day:
We were on time to the conference, so that we didn’t miss the talks. I wish I had my breakfast in our room itself, as I had to pay a INR 500 for a poor spread of breakfast buffet which I thought was complimentary.
I was all excited about my talk and a little nervous as I am not used to giving these kind of talks. If it was not for Javeed our track manager I would have shied away from the talk.The key notes started and the second keynote given by Arjun Vajpee ( I think the youngest Indian to reach the summit of the Everest) on his journey to the summit of Everest and his close encounter with death, was amazing and it made me feel embarrassed about how I was feeling nervous about the talk I had to make that afternoon.
After attending a few sessions, meeting a few people and finishing our lunch Gopal and I went to the place where we had to give the presentation. We did not carry our laptop as we thought it would be there in the venue and to our surprise it was not there. As Gopal and I struggled with a laptop we managed to borrow from one of our friends, the crowd gathered. I did not want them to wait so I started my presentation. My talk was about taking advantage of Social media and it went really well as Gopal concluded the talk. That moment I thought climbing the Everest would have been lot easier, with all due respect to Arjun :-P.
Later that evening dinner was served with good music. I liked both of it.
Second day:
A few friends went to the casino on the previous night and they were sharing their experiences there, as we were getting ready for the second day. The second day started with the key note by Pawan, director of a very famous Kannada movie, Lucia. He was sharing how he took advantage of social media and crowd funding and how he successfully made the first ever national release of a Kannada film. I got a chance to interact with him personally and he was humble enough to give some free wisdom on movie making and crowdfunding.
One gentleman had brought his Google Glass and he was gracefully sharing it with everyone who wanted to have a feel of it. Sundaresan took some good snaps with me wearing it which helped me to show off in the social media. We did not wait for the dinner as we were planning to the hit roads and to see how Goa party’s at night.
Observation:
Goa project is one of its kind and a good initiative to bring variety in the audience. There were a few organizing flaws which they could consider correcting next year. Unconference cannot be an excuse for a “could have been better” organizing effort. Otherwise it is a great get together for the people associated with Indian startups to have fun and learn from each other at the same time.
anilswonderland 