My Global GDG Summit 2018 Experience

Pre-Summit Dinner

Before the summit itself, we had this dinner party together at the Google Event Center in Sunnyvale, California with different GDGs around the world approximately 534 leads in 91 countries! That’s a lot! From those leads, I’ve met old friends from last year’s I/O and tried to gain new friends which I did :)

Registration Area

Giant LCD welcome screen

At the entrance, there’s this world map where you will put a pin where your community is. It’s so awesome there are several pins around the Philippines.

Played a game with him (I forgot his name, sorry. I’m not good with names). I also forgot the name of the game but the objective is to throw the small bag above the board or shoot it inside the hole in the board. The rule’s a bit complicated but that’s like the main objective.

Since this is a dinner, I might as well share what the food was like. I can tell you it was gooooOOOoood. I didn’t have any pictures because I was busy eating.

The Summit

The Summit is held again on the same venue as yesterday’s dinner but this time, we went in to this event area for the program. The program started with an opening keynote starting with:

Jennifer Kohl, GDG Global Program Lead

Jason Titus, VP of Engineering at Google

All GDG Regional Leads and Community Managers

Scott Heiferman, CEO & Co-founder of Meetup

It’s amazing to hear how other GDGs using Google technologies around the world has changed people’s lives and how GDGs reached new developers in their local community. What’s also amazing is that Meetup is helping more and more people to connect with each other depending on their interests.

Breakout

There are around 4–5 breakouts per time slot and it’s hard to attend to all of them so I had to attend the one, for me, that is important.

The first breakout I attended was about “Scale the Community and Events” by GDG Washington DC. They shared their experience on how their community grow. They also shared the tools they used for managing their community. Some events they host where hundreds of people attend on average. They emphasized that diversity is important especially in a team.

“Find a good team” — Tyson from GDG Washington DC.

Right after the first breakout, we took our lunch and prepared for the afternoon keynote

Afternoon Keynote

Dan Franc, Community Groups Program Lead, talked about the Google Developer Community Programs

David McLaughlin, Director, Developer Ecosystem talked about the advantages of Google Developer Communities

Erica Hanson, Community Stories, talked about inspiring stories such as Janice.

Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, Principal, Google.org, talked about creating impact to communities

Uttam Tripathi, Developer Communities Program Lead, talked more about communities

Right after the keynote, we went to Amphitheater Shoreline to get our I/O badge.

Stay tuned for my experience on Google I/O 2018!