Insider view of OdishaAI 2024

Initial days of the conference

Somewhere in the month of August 2024, there was a proposal to be a physical conference in Bhubaneswar under the name of OdishaAI. However, due to conflict of interests this was not possible. I was completely of the radar and switched myself into read-only mode due to extreme work pressure from other responsibilities.

On September 2024, virtual conference was proposed. The date was finalized long back as 5th October 2024. I was pretty frustrated with the website of the OdishaAI, the website was in plain HTML and CSS without any templating. Every page was needed to be built from scratch with zero reusability. On top of it there were not much volunteers to help me out as well. I decided to switch to a static site generator and started working on it. I chose Zola to be the static site generator and started working on it. As I had already moved with the Tabi theme for my personal blog, I used the same theme. I built the website and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. As my role as webstie maintainer became less chaotic, I started to focus on the conference.

This 2024 conference was decided to be 33hrs long continous marathon conference. The last conference we had was 12hrs long. This was a huge leap. The program schedule was the biggest challenge. We had to keep a sweet spot between the speakers and gap in between. We had to keep the audience engaged. This year also we have decided to switch to Google Meet for the conference. The last conference we had was on Zoom. I have prepared an SOP for the hosts to follow during the conference.

This describes the path of an attendee in the conference.

The conference

• The conference started at 3:00 AM IST on 5th October 2024, the time when the first ray of the day touched Earth. The conference was hosted on Google Meet. The conference was not streamed on YouTube due to technical issues.
• Speakers from all over the world presented their talks from Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, India, Ethiopia, UK, Canada, USA, and many more.
• On top of this there were simultaneous physical city conferences were held in Bengaluru, and few other places.
• Compared to previous years, the conference was smoother and went in a calm manner as we got enough time to wait for the next speaker and filler talks to keep the audience engaged.
• The conference ended at around 11:30 AM IST on 6th October 2024. The conference was ~33hrs long.

Uniqueness of the conference

Lessons Learnt

• The website should be built with a static site generator.
• The program schedule should be planned well in advance.
• The SOP should be prepared for the hosts.
• The audience should be engaged with some activities in between.
• The conference should be hosted on a platform which is easy to use for the attendees and the hosts for attendee management.
• Notify the attendees well in advance about the conference with the links.
• There should be a way to communicate the attendees about the progress of the community over the last year.

I also had the opportunity to present a talk on “ML Monitoring and Observability” as a filler slot. I also met a few more community members from the Bengaluru local conference community.

I would like to thank the organizers and volunteers who helped in organizing the conference. I also thank the people who created challenges for us and without them we could not have known that we can manage a crisis with a short period of notice. I thank the speakers who prepared materials for the conference and presented them in a short period of time. I thank the attendees who listened and asked questions to the speakers to keep it interactive.

We are looking forward to the next conference in 2025.

All attendees of the Bengaluru 2024 Odisha AI conference.