Pakistan’s First GitHub Field Day ☂️- A regional unconference for leaders
Last Sunday, 31st July 2022, Pakistan’s very first GitHub Field Day powered by GitHub Education was organized like a festival at National Incubation Center (NIC) Islamabad. GitHub campus experts and Pakistan’s first Field Expert Arsalan Khattak organized this amazing event. We chose NIC as a venue. Community leaders and members of different technical communities like, GitHub Campus Experts, Google Developer Student Clubs, Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors, AWS community builders and others from all around the Pakistan joined us at this unconference.
Don’t know what is Field Day?
Huzaifa Habib was there as the Keynote speaker. Huzaifa Habib is a tech-savvy community enthusiast, graduated as a computer systems engineer from UET Peshawar, he made his way to Silicon Valley. Currently, he is working as a Community Manager Associate for Turing.com, a Silicon Valley based remote-first company.
For the panel discussion we had Abdul Jamil as the moderator and in the panel we had Usman Aslam, RAJA AHMED, Fawadkamal and Adil Shehzad. All of them shared their success stories and their contributions for technical communities and motivated others to do the same. Then the Moderator and the audience asked questions like,
- How did you join GCE? What’s something you loved about GCE?
- What’s one important skill you need in communities?
- How communities helped you in your career?
- What do you suggest for someone applying for communities?
and also other questions.
The main purpose of Field Day Pakistan was to bring together student leaders from different regional communities to hang out, become friends, learn from each other’s mistakes and successes, and solve shared problems. So for this we had 1:1 Networking. I told them to swap their seats and go sit with the people you don’t know. Make group of 3–5 people randomly and get to know each other. I told them to connect with minimum 3 new people and also gave them some Example Questions to initiate the conversation:
- What do you do apart from tech?
- What’s something you’re obsessed about?
- Do you have pets?
- What’s a random fact about you?
- Who’s your inspiration?
Breakout Discussion was my favorite part of the Field Day Pakistan. The main idea behind Breakout Discussion was to solve struggles that our communities and community members are facing. Attendees shared ideas via Sticky notes then moderator did a quick voting on discussion topic and finalized one. After finalizing the discussion topic the moderator told attendees to make groups of 4–5 people and discuss the finalized topic e.g. Imposter Syndrome. Moderator encouraged and helped initiating the discussion. At the end of the discussion, one person from every group shared the takeaways with everyone
After the breakout discussion we had some Game Activities. we played Scavenger hunt. Team hid sticky notes before everyone’s arrival, after starting the game the attendees made a team of 3–5 people and started finding those hidden sticky notes. when found they had to complete the Hangman game and the team with most sticky notes won the game and was given swag/Pizza. Everyone who joined us was given cool GitHub swags.
We wrapped up after the snacks & Tea, and also took group pictures.
You can find other pictures at our Facebook: https://bit.ly/3Q2ZCyD
Watch Highlights here: https://bit.ly/3Jw0Zn3
My thanks to GitHub Campus Experts and the Team for Organizing this Field Day.
Arsalan Khattak: Indeed a true leader and the man behind Field Day. Thank you for making Pakistan’s first Field Day possible.
Hannan Khan: An Artist, did amazing graphics work. Hannan’s design skills and creativity is so accurate and the Pakistani aesthetics he bought that you can see in the posts.(Thank you for the limited edition cap XD)
Raheel Siddiqui: A speaker everyone loves listening to. Thank you for making the event so much Fun!
a special Thanks to Adil Shehzad, Khadija Batool Gardezi , RAJA AHMED, Alisha Naqvi, @Asharib Ahmed, Farhan Ashraf, Abdul Jamil for helping us managing the Field Day and bringing community leaders from all over the Pakistan. You guys are the real heroes (#not quoting Homelander)
