Be the change that you want to see in your Country

Hello Everyone, 

Hope you are doing well, Ramadan Kareem to you & your family. It has been a while i didn't write a blog post, but today i'm coming back with an article which i wrote for the Wisdom project about how we started Google Community in Algeria, let's go :)

On  June 15th 2011, me and my friend +Tahar Zanouda  have been selected to be the first Google Students Ambassadors in our country (Algeria), it was the best gift i got in my birth day :) , i was so happy to be selected for this role although i didn't know what to do or from where to start.

This program was launched for the first time in MENA Region ( Middle East and North Africa)  that year and in order to prepare the Google Students Ambassadors and to help them understanding their mission and how to better accomplish it, we have been invited to a training in Egypt between July 24th - 29th 2011.

I was very excited to travel for the first time outside my country and more excited to meet my fellow GSA from other countries with whom i had exchanged several emails  talking about many subjects mainly the VISA process ;)

On jully 23rd, i arrived to Egypt, a beautiful country and very helpful people, i passed the first night discussing with GSA i met in the hotel, we talked about our countries, universities and the plans of each one of us as GSA.

The day after we started the training early, it was a pleasure for me to meet and discuss with people who work at Google, they were sessions about most of Google products and also about project management, public speaking and effective communication.

One of the sessions i remember, the one dedicated to outreach program in MENA region, the speaker gave us some statistics about GTUGs in the region and i was surprised by his question : Why there is no GTUG yet in Algeria ? when many chapters have been created in other countries such Egypt and Morocco, at this time i realized that to be a Google Student Ambassador is not enough but we have to start creating a community in our country, a community which does not depends to persons and which can survive for the upcoming years.

When coming back to my country i talked to my friends about these groups and i suggested to created a new GTUG in Algeria, they were so excited about the idea, i was in my final year at the nationale Higher School of computer Science (ESI), and the majority of others were in their 4th year.

By the end of August, i filled the form of " starting a new chapter" and few days after, exactly on September 02nd i received an email from Van Riper saying that my application has been accepted and i can start the process to launch Algiers GTUG the first Google Technology User Group in Algeria :D i started by creating a mailing list, and a website, also i got a @gtugs.org email :)

We announced officially GTUG Algiers to public on September 7th, this information was published on most of local newspapers and magazines, we spent around a month working together to establish the strategy of the group ( we -here- means the leading staff which where composed of 8 personnes, all of them were a computer science Students), it was so helpful that our school accepted to give us an office for the Group.

On October 11th, 2011 we organized our first event " GSA/GTUG Welcome Day"; during the event we presented the two GSA and the GTUG chapter and also we opened registration for membes who wanted to join us, it was a very successful event, we had around 300 attendees and everyone was excited to join our Group.

During the first two months we focused more on the team, this why we did not organized many events, but we did a lot of internal meeting in order to improve the internal communication, by the end of 2011 we started organizing  small events, as we were the first and the unique we have moved also to some other towns to organize events there, by the beginning of 2012 Algiers GTUG have been listed on TOP 10 most active chapters on the world and the most active in MENA Region on the Pulse page.

Thus i have been selected by Google to attend The Global GDG Summit at Mountain View and Google I/O 2012 at Moscone center, this was a huge opportunity for me, i had the pleasure to meet most of GDG managers, also i attended some interesting sessions, especially those dedicated to Android and Cloud Platform.

i came back to my country with more energy and more motivation, the next mission was to migrate the GTUG Chapter to a new brand, which is the GDG Program ( Google Developer Groups) ..... to be continued.