The Most Difficult Job - Building Trust, Huh?

October 7, 2014

We all know building trust is very difficult. Now what’s more difficult than that? Take a minute to silently wonder. Now that you have an answer in your mind, read on to know what we think -

We have existed for a little more than 6 years now. During this time, we have done our bit (a few events like the CodeRetreat and OpenHack) to give back to the community. A few are never enough, right? So, we thought we could get a lot of value learning from the ones who have been involved in building a significantly large Indian Software Community for a while now.

Hence, I decided to volunteer with Hasgeek for JSFoo 2014. Once I decided to volunteer, the next steps were quite simple - I had to just drop an email to Zainab enquiring her about the same. The conversations happened in frequent cycles and before I  knew I was one of the volunteers.

Initially, I thought I would just make this post about my experience volunteering at JSFoo 2014, but then I realized it won’t add any value to anyone, including me if I wouldn’t put down some learning. Simply put, the learnings can be categorized under - Craft, The Golden Trifecta and Values.

FYI, * I'll come to the "toughest job" part soon after I finish describing the above categories.*

Craft

Doing our job well brings us success. Here, “well” is a subjective term.

• Making it objective* - If a speaker is knowledgeable in the field he is speaking about and also has a great way to keep the audience interested in the talk till the end by really empathizing with them, then he is a craftsperson.

Same goes with everyone else. Its about striving towards the outcome of the event - creating the best user experience for the community.

Zainab, Kiran, Rajeef, Priyanka, Basavaraj, Tony and every single person at JSFoo was constantly working towards making the event a successful one.

• Food for thought* What if we define Craft as an impact that we want to create and Craftsmanship as the skill to create the desired impact? Any community event is aimed at making an impact, to help it grow.

The Golden Trifecta

Appreciation, courtesy and respect - with this you can make anything happen and everyone at JSFoo somehow had it in their culture. Period.

Values - Extreme Programming Values

Feedback, communication, simplicity, courage and respect, keeping this constant, if we can move forward towards doing what we want to do, embracing the change and tweaking processes we follow is enough to make an impact out there. JSFoo again, was a typical example of this kind of a mindset.

The intent behind volunteering at JSFoo was to learn how to make an event successful, step by step. Did I get the steps? No. What I did get was the formula to make anything successful.

The formula is to strive towards craft, using the golden trifecta with a strong belief in our values - developing a mindset of craftsmanship. JSFoo is a commitment made to hundreds of Javascript enthusiasts - to create value in the world of a Javascript programmer and we as a team did it.

Coming to The Toughest Job

At the end, I agree that building trust is a tough thing but what’s tougher is to * maintain* that trust.

Volunteering at JSFoo 2014 made me realize that without a mindset of craftsmanship, its very difficult for organizations such as HasGeek to repeatedly pull off successful events such as JSFoo, month after month, year after year. And its that kind of consistency that's required to maintain trust.