/home/dhananjay

PuneTech is 1 year old today. Birthdays and New Year days are a great time to reflect upon the year gone past, and it was a little difficult to let go of an opportunity to comment.

A community is as strong as its participants. A community is also as strong as the people who bind it together. A tech community is fed by content. A tech community is also fed by character. What I have learnt about PuneTech is that even if it is modest in attracting newer people into the fold, it does a great job of binding it together. In Navin Kabra and Amit Paranjape, and supported by many others one realises one has met a set of people who really want to bind and then grow rather than grow and then bind. Important elements for a solid foundation for a community.

In the past one year PuneTech has provided a community / platform / vehicle / opportunity / facilitation for (in no particular order):

• Increased creation and sharing of Technology related content, especially related to Pune based companies and individuals
• A watering hole for people with related interests to come together, interact and grow their interactions.
• Collaboration with other bodies of overlapping interests, most notably the Pune Open Coffee Club
• Network engagement and sustainance supporting essential infrastructural needs of a network such as event organising / sharing / reminders
• Visibility driving for participants by both writing about the community participants or allowing them to write about themselves.

One of the things that does strike about PuneTech is its freshness and its willingness to experiment, learn and retry. Its not only growing but continuously reinventing itself to stay more relevant and useful. In retrospect, a part of the the Pune Technology Community is far better served today thanks to PuneTech. Kudos to PuneTech for a great year. And while in my limited knowledge, it has been more successful than any other similarly focused effort in Pune, it could grow even faster. But what I like about it is that its growth so far is much more sustainable than it is rapid. Allowing the growth to gather more momentum while continuing to retain sustainability will require many more of us to ask ourselves how we can support PuneTech and then help providing and implementing the answers. Thats the kind of nutrition a 1 year old needs.

PuneTech just published its Comment Policy. Given its role in promoting technology usage and knowledge transfer in and outside Pune and (in my perception) to maintain a strong brand perception, this is just what the doctor ordered. Its a pretty detailed policy, but the short version is cute enough to tempt me to reproduce below :

if (the comment is not relevant to the article)
     We will delete it;
       /* take your irrelevant rambling elsewhere */

  else if (the comment is a personal attack)
     we will delete it;
       /* rude people not welcome here */

  else if (the comment has abusive language)
     we will delete it;
       /* we are trying to have a civil discussion here */

  else if (the comment exposes PuneTech to legal liability)
     we will delete it;
       /* we don't want to get sued
          that distracts from the purpose of this website
          more details below */

  else
     your comment is welcome;