SD Expo Europe – From the other side!

Sometimes I wonder if being introduced to Support Driven has been one of the best parts of my career life so far!

Last year, I attended SD Expo in Portland. Whenever I become part of community events, my aim is to volunteer and help as much as possible. This is like my way of giving back to the community. Last year, I volunteered as Talk Editor – where I worked with few of the speakers, in terms of helping them with their slides or any other help they needed.

This year I moved to volunteering as Talk Co-ordinator for SD Expo in Belgrade. Wherein I was working with the Talk Editors who were further working with the Speakers. The responsibilities included but not limited to:

• Helping Talk Editors with anything and everything. They can have questions from Speakers and my job was to help with answers to those questions by finding more details. They can also need your help in contacting a speaker for xyz reasons.
• I was responsible for co-ordinating things to make sure we had the slides ready by time.
• I had to make sure the master slide-deck was ready on time.
• On the day of the Expo, I had to take care of Speaker Orientation and MC Orientation. This was a session to walk the speakers through all the details – in terms of how to find the room where they’re going to give the talk, when to arrive, how to keep track of the time etc.
• I also took on the role of MC on the Expo day. This is where you introduce the speaker before their talk. You share some personal tidbits about them to break the ice before the talk.

Takeaways and Contributions:

• Volunteering as a Talk Coordinator is a good opportunity to test and improve your organisational skills. You’re literally organising a one whole section of the conference ie. Talks. I’m really grateful to Andrea for giving me this opportunity.
• A great way to network with community members. I can say I am now good friends with all the Talk Editors that I worked with. We shared great memories while working together.
• I was able to streamline the process further for future conferences by giving suggestions where I saw room for improvement. They’re added to the list then and there! ✅

Achievement

This is my achievement. Those Kudos mean a lot to me. I used to dream of being able to contribute to the community and I’m doing it now! 😌

PS – Some other memories!

My connecting flight was delayed big time. I reached the hotel at 1:00 AM in the morning after an almost ~20-22 hours flight. But, I was up again at 6:30AM to start the day. Apparently, the excitement of being part of the conference took over and I wasn’t feeling tired at all. I was probably the only person in flip-flops! But hey-ho! I was enjoying! 😉😂

This was the first SD Expo in Europe. I’m looking forward to many more in the future.